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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

I You remember your childhood Your tow-headed, reddish-tinged mother, who yelled after you all day like a Paraguayan peasant chasing her donkey And your father flattened in front of the TV, murmuring curses against the people flickering on the screen Your grades at school were average, pathetic, as you competed against the ones at the top of the class with their brilliance adapted to hedge-hopping teachers’ brains who flitted from idea to another on stage like macaques   Your sexuality came out in full bloom next to a friend, masturbating at the same time in a basement, a disused bathhouse Then a prostitute, then a kid your age, wild but inept, and a stream of others to give your childhood a feeling of recklessness But it’s more likely that, too shy and lacking any charm, you never learned much about the world and all these years now seem to you like a black hole centred around your puberty   Then you got married, you procreated, you bought a place to live, furniture, obedient and laborious things, and day after day tons of food, whittled away, expelled, mixed together by the sewers of the city in a communal digestion by all its inhabitants, comprising the furious ones and those who were at each other’s throats when they met each other on the street You’ve had the same job for fifteen years, they like you, they’re getting ready to lay you off, to transfer you, it’s a promotion, a disgrace, they’re waiting for you to hand in your letter of resignation, nobody’s got a bleaker outlook than you, you’re following a useless line of arguing, they’ll make you a cardinal, you’ll become the pope of this company of fleas, of salad bowls, and if you’re a female, you’ll be the first woman to hold this post since this company was founded in the century of lights   Every woman comes from the same orifice at first, she has an infancy, a childhood She procreates, and she’s the one who pushes her children outside with all her strength as if she had made it her sole mission She’s had