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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

She slides it into her mouth   She lets it grow heavy, take on warmth, breadth and shape, push against her palate, weigh upon her tongue   Immobile lips, minute internal contractions: her movements have grown less frenzied   She thinks of paper flowers that unfold when placed on water   She moves away, and contemplates the erect penis     *     Uniform sky, a dove-grey canvas stretched between the tower blocks; cars roll in an unbroken line across the horizon; at regular intervals, the varnished brown of a streetlight interrupts the alignment of the trees; cops glide by on bicycles, eyeing up the wedding boutiques: banal geometry which Jeanne matches with her steps, her breathing and her thoughts   She walks up the boulevard   But she changes direction, crosses, and the broken angle of her path is sharp enough to puncture the space like a nail that catches on a piece of fabric and tears along its length The city falls apart, loses its abscissas and ordinates, creating a maelstrom of sky, trees, streetlights, bicycles, dresses The sign on the corner of a pharmacy liquefies, flows down, mingles with the electoral posters, becomes sluggish, slips into the dead leaves, turns the tarmac over, swallows the clothes rails at Guerrisol and the iron shutters, consumes the pavement Jeanne sinks down   A dizzy spell, people assume, when she leans against a shop window – inhales, exhales – while the smooth coldness of the glass goes through her shirt and freezes her shoulder blades – inhales, exhales – while she closes her eyes and tilts her head backwards – inhales,   it’s always when she tilts her head back     *     Jeanne has drawn the curtains; the light, grown green, has filled the room like water   Jeanne listens to the noises of the hotel – lift moving up along its cables, doors slamming, groundswell of a vacuum cleaner It is nearly midday, the tourists have left to perform their role on the squares of Paris, their rooms are empty, the management is resuming its authority A trolley of miniature shampoos and towels approaches, slows down, but the room is protected by the card hanging from the door handle which