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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

Everyone who asks questions, asks in some way about love The question is one half, the answer the other If you separate the Lovers you don’t end up with two distinct people Instead you’re left with two halves of a self, incapable of doing much on their own Imagine a coin with one side, or a story with one side Imagine peeling the skin off your arm Imagine the worst thing that could ever happen to you, happening to you When one Lover’s gone, the other doesn’t know what to do When a Lover was a waitress she dropped all the plates she carried When a Lover was a cashier he could never count out the right change When they worked opposite hours they lost entire days They looked at the moon more than they looked at themselves They’d rifle through medicine cabinets in other people’s houses and read the magazines other people subscribed to They went to the places where others decided to go When they’re apart they forget their names; when they’re together they don’t respond to them   ‘We can tell you your future, if you tell us your dreams,’ is what the Lovers say upon being found They listen to one of your dreams if you buy each a Moscow Mule, and after will tell a part of the coming days It can be insignificant, like a bee ‘Watch for bees,’ a Lover says to you ‘Are you allergic?’ You’re not ‘That’s good’ Their smiles are sleepy; they ruffle each other’s hair   The next Tuesday you step on a bee You see the Lovers later that week at the Mercantile You ask how they’d extracted bees from your dream, in which there weren’t any bees ‘There’s no future in dreams,’ one Lover says, the girl ‘None that would be worth telling, anyway’ You expect the Lovers to evade but they don’t ‘It’s about faces,’ the boy goes on ‘Seeing what’s there The past is in your teeth The future’s in your eyes’   You wonder why they asked about