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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

A spectre haunted the Lützow-Ufer – the spectre of Dadaism It hung from the ceiling and peered down from the walls, it sat on pedestals and screamed from posters:‘TAKE DADA SERIOUSLY’ – only to add, winking at the visitor, ‘it’s worth it’  In Summer 1920 the Kunsthandlung Dr Otto Burchard, a Berlin art gallery near the bustling Potsdamer Platz and lush Tiergarten, was the venue for the First International Dada Fair, and its invitation card promised revolution   The Dadaistic person is the radical opponent of exploitation; the logic of exploitation creates nothing but fools, and the Dadaistic person hates stupidity and loves nonsense! Thus, the Dadaistic person shows himself to be truly real, as opposed to the stinking hypocrisy of the patriarch and to the capitalist perishing in his armchair  This exclamatory mood prevailed inside the small venue In a mockery of an academic, salon-style exhibition, its walls were covered with large typographic posters, small frames with photomontages, with cut-outs, and with expansive paintings that used traditional oils as much as rough materials that looked like they were picked up from the gutters which the paintings depicted Collage, montage and found images were the common denominators in the cacophony of carnivalistic commands hurled at the spectator: ‘Finally open up your mind!’ shouted one large photographic poster; ‘Against Art!’ another From the ceiling hung a horrible mannequin, a human shape with a pig’s mask stuffed into a German military uniform, looming grotesquely over artworks and visitors alike   The artist list reads like a who’s who of the Berlin Dada art world in the 1920s: Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Wieland Herzfelde and many other now famous figures of European art history all contributed to the exhibition: Hausmann, agitator and polemicist, had penned the invitation’s pointed manifesto; Dix had sent paintings certain to antagonise traditional taste; Grosz played a central role in organising the event and Herzfelde contributed significantly to the exhibition’s catalogue  Theirs was a rambunctious, chest-beating, clamorous affair The fair asserted its opposition to the traditional tastes, artistic media, and forms of organisation of