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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

Camera You take my sweet sleeping face You take my innocent smile You take my large breasts Even though I asked you not to You take the mole on my shoulder You take the blouse I have taken off You take my dirty room Even though I asked you not to You take me when I am angry You take me when I get hit You take me when I get kicked across the room Even though I do not know you have done it You take my house when it is burning You take my younger brother when he is falling You take my younger sister when she is collapsing You take my older brother when he burns to death You take my older sister when she kills herself You take my mother as she is weeping Is that because I didn’t tell you not to take them? You take the dry skin on my arms and legs You take my swollen face You take my crooked spine You take my hair that has fallen out I no longer have the strength to tell you no This one’s no good, this one’s good This one’s no good, this one’s good As you look at the monitor You choose the photos The versions of me that survive The versions of me that are erased (The versions of me that survive (The versions of me that are erased Even if you erase me It does not mean you didn’t take me (Even if you erase me (It does not mean you didn’t take me You took me And erased me (You took me (And erased me You took lots of me You erased lots of me More of me than what you took Disappeared with the work of a single finger   Even After He is Gone, the Cat is Here