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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

Iconoclasts have never known quite what to do with the ruined fragments that they leave behind If we imagine the first English iconoclasts in action as they undertook to rid churches of images and holy objects in the sixteenth century, images of grim-faced fanatics wielding hammers and flaming torches are likely to spring to mind But if iconoclasm is loud and violent in its fury, it is haunted by its quiet aftermath, in which the meanings that it releases prove troublingly difficult to control One response might be to leave nothing behind at all In 1547, as iconoclasm in England assumed new ferocity under Edward VI, a royal injunction urged the clergy to remove and destroy all ‘monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition; so that there remain no memory of the same’   This enforced forgetting, however, was a dangerous strategy If superstition were utterly purged and its memory obliterated, there was the risk that it might be repeated The overcoming of error needed to be remembered if its repetition were to be guarded against In many churches broken statues or desecrated images were accordingly left in situ, as salutary reminders of a reviled past This too had its risks, however Even in their broken form, such idols might continue to inspire reverence rather than revulsion After all, if the fragmentation of relics in the Middle Ages in no way reduced their sanctity – a splinter from the True Cross was as holy as the whole – then the sacred remained sacred even in its ruined state Iconoclasm, which seemed to aim at absolute and irrevocable change, turned out to be torn between forms of remembrance and forgetting that it could not fully control   Art Under Attack is the first exhibition devoted to the history of British Iconoclasm, and it is in many ways the realisation of an iconoclast’s nightmares If the iconoclast wants the object to vanish and be forgotten, the exhibition reveals the stubborn tendency of defaced objects to linger and accrue new meanings The first two rooms, devoted to the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth century,