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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

Consider the exclamation mark Medieval in origin, this blink of ink has a gift for controversy A single point can signal a moment of joy or incredulity Use two or more, though, and risk being dismissed as shrill or shouty, especially if you are a woman   Feminist thinker and independent scholar Sara Ahmed has written 11 books, but her latest, Complaint! (2021), is the only one to employ an exclamation in its title Yet to immerse oneself in her body of work – which includes several public lectures, seminars and workshops – is to feel an intensification of everyday experience Her works are all attuned to affect, wilful subjects, and the phenomenology of trying to make yourself heard while living in a marked body: as an ‘unhappy queer’,’ a ‘melancholic migrant’, a woman and/or person of colour As Ahmed wrote in What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), ‘Sometimes, I feel like I am an exclamation point, as if in being I am shrieking’   In that book, a roving work of phenomenology, she examines ‘use as technique’ by closely examining a constellation of things, including an empty tube of toothpaste, a postbox, an arm and Jeremy Bentham’s desiccated body She shows how utilitarianism was historically used to shape the subjectivities of those deemed least desirable and most disposable – the poor, the incarcerated, the orphaned and the unhoused   What’s the Use? is the final book in a trilogy that began with The Promise of Happiness (2010), which looks at the regulatory uses of happiness, followed by Willful Subjects (2014), which valorises ‘wilfulness’ – a disposition towards disobedience, or to be ‘what gets in the way of what is on the way’ – as a way for feminists and minority groups to assert agency In its own way, each of her books tracks, with forensic care and attention, the peristalsis of power: what feeds it, what impedes it, what lubricates its sinuous passage through the halls of institutions and everyday life Bodies, for Ahmed, are a locus of feminist investigation Having an ‘out of skin’ experience – being at odds with the