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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

Ode to Venice Before the Sea of Theaters (from Arde el mar, 1966)   The false cups, the poison, and the skull Of the theaters García Lorca   The sea has its mechanics as love has its symbols With what racket the red curtain rises Or in this proscenium above an empty stage Sounds a rumor of statues, iris fronds, cutlasses, Doves that descend and softly alight A chessboard of verdure, composed of cravats The blight on my cheek recollects time past And in my heart seethes a droplet of lead My hand was to my breast, the clock corroborates The reason for the clouds and the stiffening of their sails A rising tide, roses on tightropes Over the voltaic arc of Venice’s night That year of my lost youth, Marble on the Dogana, as Pound has remarked And the table of a casket in the density of the canals Go on, much further, deep inside the night, Over the ducal tapestry, shadows interwoven, Princes or nereids laid waste by time What purity, a nude or an ephebe deceased In the boundless halls of clouded reminiscence Was I there? Must I believe I was he, And he the suffering impaling my flesh? How fragile I was then, and why                                                             Is it true You differ, snowflakes, in the snowcapped park, The one that today harbors your love on its face Or the one that died there in Venice of beauty? The live stones speak of a memory present As the vein impels its conduits of blood, It comes, leaves, returns to the planet, And life thus expands in the silence of tenters, The past is affirmed at this uncertain hour So much have I written, so much I wrote then I don’t know If it was worth it or is You, for whom My life is more certain, and you others, Who hear in my verse a discrepant sphere, will know its signet or art Speak it, you, or speak it, you others, and sweetly, perchance, Beguile my sorrow Night, night in Venice Five years now, how so long? I am Who I was then, I know how