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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

It seems to me that the 00s ended with the final withdrawal of NATO soldiers from Afghanistan in 2021 Or with the end of Britney’s conservatorship Or with the coming into public knowledge that Paris Hilton had been abused as a child, and that her seemingly unfounded mode of celebrity, the unhinged bling of her stardom, so endemic to that decade, could in fact be reread as the triumph of a victim It is as if the decade before last is only now being tried, its witnesses called to the stand one by one Gilmore Girls: feminist Gossip Girl: not George Bush: apparently moderate, by comparison The contemporary is looping back to its mother, that first decade of the millennium, which for so long left its questions unanswered, ribbons fluttering in the wind     Nothing is ever over when it’s over, only much later This is partly because hours and days and years are arbitrary divisions, and partly because many things are unfathomable in the moment they take place, and so simply don’t take place in that moment, but stretch out for however long it takes for us to be able to grasp them You could say the nineteenth century ended when the Crystal Palace burst into flames and Virginia Woolf finished her novel The Years on November 30, 1936 My college era began two years after I started college, and only ended two years after I left This was because the affects which defined that period took some time to take hold, and would not be so easily superseded by what came after So strong and complex were they, so bold in the questions they brought up, that nothing that happened during that time would help me understand them – the clues were in the aftermath    In childhood and adolescence you are defencelessly immersed in the public sphere and its institutions Without the experience of any precedence at all, everything is truth The arrival of large espresso-based to-go drinks in Northern Europe, of Miss Sixty jeans and reality TV and homes decorated entirely in white with a single