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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

Formally, I and the undersigned— What? Use, like Mama said, your imagination if you still have one where scripts still sway like spring- hipped hula girls on Ford dashboards, where cursive still wraps its tail around your right hand like a pet corn snake, where syntax still stutters, lurches into a sin, a sandwich, a pleasured refrain; if that much of you remains, you’ll see them, us, me (lonely as a broken doorknob), the possible contours of silent manifestos—do hereby request you speak for us only if you speak for us We realise there is that which we do not see We realise there is that which you do not see We realise knowledge is fragile as mucous membrane, but we don’t want much Only not to be taken,   only for hope everywhere— wildflowers, voice, water   We will pay—have paid— with ocean bodies, river minds   Let us watch the water rise, smash stone