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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

who bravely blasts their breath through the horn flares of gloomy streets, into dripping construction trailers, dropped by the dead, the dull anxiety of homeowners, clutching sausage and cookies under their arms   phalanges rattle over a piano smashed in the Winter Palace I am only dreaming this, only dreaming   hare krishnas shaved like newly-weds push through the cotton frost   * an oblate antifascist in the metro crush secretly broadcasts through his horn with blood   a coded sound – a French horn, in comes an orchestra of autists in magic carriages to the cackling of iron actors and the chatter of the auction   a sale on scorched backwater ontology in the slime of pudenda I am only dreaming this, only dreaming   * cloudy beer without foam, where god lives in the uncanny consciousness of poets hovering over a supper of bread alone and world news, grunting in wonder:   look it’s snowing, tucking away the ashes in ovens and vases with care   sitting turkish-style (or indian-style, as you lot say) online you broadcast something from the loudspeaker of opposition, like a lackey, with restless glances into worn lacunas,   * into the cartography of the place – right here, syria moves fast along the fingernail’s edge, turkey’s stuffing bombardments down its throat, and in its breast france’s flywheel spins, here a steel voice gnaws through the frame of leviathan, that drunk crocodile…   winter diary: I came to you to find freedom, to take you by the hand, to take in your last warmth you won’t say no to one last meeting, will you?   * Lenin flows by fast   in the statuary stillness of private meetings, private unions, Lenin’s speech hangs over this place like a butcher’s apron sanitized with bleach   pigs squealing, cutting through Nevsky Prospect dull eyes,    and a knot of new year’s snakes on a head without a face a black Škoda and half a body fallen half way out – at the breast on the Field of Mars   the butcher’s ballet and the icy swings of tear-stained acid trips, covering the eternal flame