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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 saw her father at Smith’s By accident She was paying the heat bill After paying the heat bill, she deposited some of the money he had given her for rent As she walked out of Aisle 6 near the cereal, she saw him His eyes were looking up, searching for something But she saw him She decided that when he turned his gaze towards Captain Crunch he couldn’t possibly see her Walking past him quietly, she snuck out of his view Her father was wearing a black sweater and black jogging pants He looked scrawny and not like her father Whenever she saw her father, her heart ached Especially from a distance, from a place where he couldn’t reciprocate her gaze   Her father had suffered extensively during his sixty years of existence Since arriving in the States in his thirties, he had worked for the poultry factory for nearly thirty years, and when he retired he was penniless, not from gambling, but from poor money management After all, her father never had a high school education He dropped out of school when he was 15 to join the Army, fighting against the communists and Viet Cong When the war ended, no one wanted to hire him, especially those from the North, moving South after the evasion He was a white sheet of paper that no one wanted So her father worked for a truck company that transported fruits and vegetables from the highlands of Vietnam into the cities He transported goods from Ha Giang, Lao Cai, Quang Ninh, and even from Dalat He transported Japanese plums, Asian pears, etc Domestic market was his expertise   For three weeks now, she hadn’t spoken to him Despite sharing the same bedroom and same bed, she hadn’t technically spoken to him She had purposefully been avoiding him She hid under the bedsheets in the late morning, concealing her face beneath a mask of fabric Sometimes the fabric clung to her nose and for moments she felt suffocated as if a cat had been sitting on her face and inhaling