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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

Caves, sleep, absence of light     1 Oh what is this light that holds us fast? Frank O’Hara [1]   I was about to move house and the move was happening very quickly My new home was just four miles east but I was leaving the part of London where I’d been born and had lived for most of my life Although the reasons for moving were happy ones, I hadn’t anticipated the level of unsettlement it would bring about One day, feeling overwhelmed by the detail of it all, I decided that what I really needed was to live alone in a cave I was walking past a cinema and went into whatever was showing just to be able to sit in the dark It was a film about a cave[2]   The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994 It had long ago been sealed off by rockfall, leaving its 32,000-year-old paintings perfectly preserved  The pale walls are covered in bison, horses, rhinoceroses, lions and bears They are strikingly fluid – a lion’s profile is given in a single six-foot-long stroke – but the artist has done even more to bring them alive The cave is full of outcrops and recesses, the walls ripple and dip, and the animals have been drawn accordingly  One bison has been given eight legs and a rhinoceros a series of six horns to indicate, like a series of frames, that they are moving  I was in a cave that was a cinema watching a film about a cave that was a cinema   The archaeologists and historians mapping and researching the cave had the open mind, and open imagination, that perhaps comes from operating so far beyond the human scale One said that he dreamt of lions ‘Real lions or painted lions?’  ‘Both’ He sounded surprised to be asked to make the distinction Another tried to explain how the world might have been perceived 32,000 years ago, describing an everyday condition of metamorphosis: ‘A tree can speak … a wall can talk to us, refuse or accept us’   In the cinema – a place of talking