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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

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of this past year I remember at first, the two times I was out in public afterwards, both times at the Whitney, I was nervous to take my breast out, because Leo was crying and people were staring, I felt panicky and self-conscious, which I think made the baby more agitated I became used to taking my breast out in art spaces, and began to savour it with sometimes a fatigued perversity and other times something more sacred, like the installation at the Lygia Pape show at the Met Breuer, in the corner of the nearly pitch-black room where gold thread made geometric curtains like beams of light, or recently on a bench in front of the El Greco ‘Holy Family’ at the Met, the way in which Mary presses down on her breast and points the nipple towards baby Jesus, both her and Joseph gazing downwards at the central point of the baby, the baby’s little hand on his mother’s hand I nursed Leo outside the bubblegum phallic Franz West sculpture at MASS MoCA, amidst the industrial landscape and grey cool light, her straddling me, downy head bobbing back and forth between each breast, and this fall in front of a Harry Dodge video at the New Museum’s gender show, because there was a bench to sit on I figured if there were so many penises in that room it was okay to have my breast peek out through my leather jacket, like a floppy blue-veined sac of a sculpture, scratched and sad At the MoMA it is difficult to find a place to breastfeed I didn’t get to see all of the Louise Lawler show because it had taken all of our energy to get there on the subway, and it was almost closing time, and I couldn’t find anywhere I felt comfortable to nurse, as Leo was still quite young and I still felt shaky and strange occupying public space in the city with a baby