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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

‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) In Cigarettes, Harry Mathews’s novel published in the same year, a character finds himself quite literally crucified, replete with a crown of thorns – a consequence, and perversion, of love In Catholic theology, the idea of a love so pure as to evoke the ultimate sacrifice is approximated through the relic: a scrap of a shroud, a fragment of bone, a nail once pierced through flesh Imbued with the charge of history and the promise of salvation, these items both fuel and sustain the particular desire for proximity to holiness among believers   Pilgrims to Danh Vo’s mid-career survey at the Guggenheim Museum may find such desires pricked, teased, and thwarted by works that package the relic for the contemporary art market The Danish-Vietnamese artist, known for conceptual installations comprising rare and curiously sourced ready-mades, has been a fixture in blue-chip galleries and private collections At the Guggenheim, these objects are sparsely arranged on the museum’s winding ramp, where they are called upon to invoke grand themes: the legacy of American imperialism, and the artist’s lapsed Catholicism, among them Vo was born in Bà Ria, Vietnam toward the end of the Vietnam War, and moved with his family to a refugee camp in Singapore, settling eventually in Denmark Interspersing family photographs with artefacts from colonial Vietnam, the exhibition oscillates between intimate glimpses of the artist’s life and the sweep of history   Vo’s connection to a network of high-profile lenders has abetted a practice of skilled connoisseurship that allows the artist to impress audiences by the sheer incredulity of his acquisition Hung along the Guggenheim’s ramp is a chandelier from the former ballroom of the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where the Paris Peace Accord ending the Vietnam War was signed in 1973 In 2012, Vo acquired a group of objects from the estate of Robert S McNamara – the American secretary of defence between 1961 and 1968 – when the Vietnam War began to escalate Lot 20 Two Kennedy Administration