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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 mind my pomegranate like an open door watch it from the corner of my bed with the lights on It grows on trees here so I mind my pomegranate & like an open door   it creaks fruitlessness; do all pomegranates stain like shadows? I crack its fruit onto the floor and mind my pomegranate like an open door, watch from the corner of my bed   The pomegranates felt a sense of belatedness so they imitated until they created their own culture By this, of course, I mean the pomegranates felt a sense of belatedness so   their art was modelled after Chronos, engendering time and all its tensions Even building in their prime the pomegranates felt a sense of belatedness so they created until they imitated their own   Have you ever heard of the Heraclitean pomegranate? Or seen its shape-shifting jewels whip light from an egg-yolk into vanishing air? Oh but have you ever heard of the Heraclitean pomegranate?   Tell me, when was the last time you fed the pomegranate, allowed its composition to transform you? Spill it! Have you ever heard of the Heraclitean pomegranate? Or seen it whip jewels like a shapeshifter?   I was pomegranate the other day and tripped over a bur Nowadays, I always get a sprain when I pomegranate My grandfather said he was pomegranate the other day and tripped—   like when the colonisers withdrew and left his tree exposed to the hewing I don’t want to think about when I was pomegranate The other day I tripped over It was a blur Nowadays, I always forget my name     This pomegranate is like a pomegranate: it falls from the sky and stains everything red on impact It’s deaf to the screaming children This pomegranate is like a pomegranate:   you can’t tell which way or who it’ll split For fate decides—meaning power decides It’s too late when this pomegranate is like a pomegranate falls from the sky and stains everything red