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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

Welcome to the Anthropocene, that planetary tempo in which all the metabolic rhythms of the world start dancing to crazy new tunes Sure, you can join the Heideggerians and blame western metaphysics for all this You could put it down to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history Or, perhaps it is time to find some new characters to talk about, and new objects of thought Maybe critical writing could get its head out of the cloudy superstructures and think again about this base and vulgar world The problem with the traditional humanist disdain for science and technology is that it is now a line of thought pursued most vigorously again by reactionaries and fascists If you want to accept the reality of climate change, that most awkward rift in the planet’s metabolism, then that means accepting the science on which it is based Accepting the science, it turns out, means relying on a particular kind of infrastructure that produces it   Perhaps it is time then to turn to a kind of critical theory that was particularly interested in infrastructures, in technologies, and in sciences For example: let’s talk about Alexander Bogdanov Lenin’s rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party, he was an early theorist of the biosphere, and founder of Proletkult, the movement for worker’s knowledge Let’s talk about Andrey Platonov, the finest product of Proletkult, who gave up writing during the Russian Civil War to become an engineer and fight famine in the countryside Those seem to me the kinds of writers we might have need of again   Platonov worked on four kinds of infrastructure: the railways, electricity, irrigation, and the rather more subtle but pervasive one of standards, when he worked on weights and measures He gives a vivid description of the struggle to build up infrastructure in his story ‘The Motherland of Electricity’ Set in 1921, it follows a young engineer, ‘haunted by the task of the struggle against ruin’, who is summoned to a remote village by a rather poetic communiqué from the secretary of the village soviet The land is parched, the peasants are