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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

Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use Almost all famous discoveries (by Darwin, Edison, Einstein, et al) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them Eg, the commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorised by topic Enquire Within Upon Everything, a commercially successful parody of the commonplace book, was published in London in 1890 There’s no such thing as originality Invention and innovation grow out of networks of people and ideas All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the pre-existing Mixing passages of his own approximately 50/50 with passages from other writers, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave is a cry of mourning about dissolution – of society (WWII), the body (ageing), love (divorce), and literature (‘The English language has, in fact, so contracted to our own littleness that it is no longer possible to make a good book out of words alone’)   Published with footnotes in the UK and the US, Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic masterpiece, Minima Moralia, first appeared, in Germany, in 1951, sans footnotes What was unexplained art in the German edition became dutiful scholarship when published inEngland; citation domesticated the work, flattened it, denuded it, robbed it of its excitement, risk, danger   Rather like Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man in that the art consists of taking someone else’s material and reframing it, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip juxtaposes photographs and historical documents from turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jackson County, WI, to create what he calls ‘an experiment in both history and alchemy’ – the alchemy being Lesy’s transfiguration of American pastoral into Munch nightmare   In