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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

‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film,’ I told almost everyone I spoke to for about two months earlier this year, ‘is about werewolf detectives’ Nobody seemed too surprised, given the fact that ‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film is about werewolf detectives’ functions not unlike a millennial ‘for sale/baby shoes’ about the perils of child stardom, and nobody seemed especially enthusiastic about seeing it unless it was to rubberneck A car crash – now a common metaphor for an extremely famous woman with a death wish in both life and work –compels precisely because it provokes a feeling of alarming nearness to its heat People do not hesitate to warm their hands on Lindsay Lohan’s fire, nor do they hesitate to fan its flames by pointing to her worst mistakes For the past nine or ten years, or for about as long as I’ve been writing, Lindsay Lohan has for me been a perpetual touchstone, a fact that I once explained by citing her precocious genius, and which I am now more likely to elucidate by saying she is representative of a millennial obsession with early-life promise and adult disaster Gifted children, at least judging from media Twitter, were a dime a dozen for my generation; common, too, are grown-up, deadbeat failures, numbed by drugs and bummed-out by depression The enduring and memetic popularity of famous women on trajectories that have, at one time or another, clattered downhill at tremendous speed – particularly those who happen to be former child stars, à la Britney Spears – suggests a certain vicarious thrill at the explosive way they waste themselves   What in childhood can seem preternatural or God-given in its grace seems, in an adult with a pill addiction and more DUIs than Oscar nominations, like a sick, tremendous waste In the case of ‘a great talent with a really sexy voice’ per Robert Altman, not to mention ‘a terrific actress’ in the eyes of Meryl Streep, self-destructiveness in adulthood looks a lot like taking a lit match to the gas tank of a Porsche Lohan, with her luminous good looks, her vaguely Lolita-ish adolescent vibe,