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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 produce awkward objects,’ the sculptor Alina Szapocznikow wrote in 1972 ‘Of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth’ Awkward, precarious, vulnerable bodies are as crucial to an understanding of Szapocznikow’s oeuvre as they are to her biography As a result, her life and work are often viewed as inseparable, a conflation that poses an interesting predicament regarding the extent to which one should read an artist’s work through the lens of their personal experience   Born into a Jewish intellectual family in Kalisz, Poland in 1926, Szapocznikow was ghettoised by the Nazis during her teenage years, and sent to concentration camps including Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz After the war, she trained as a sculptor in both Prague and Paris, and returned to Poland in 1951, where she produced a number of large-scale public commissions and exhibitions, including The Climbing (1959), a monument to those who died in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising In 1963, she moved back to Paris, where she remained until her death from breast cancer in 1973, aged 46   Despite having been an influential and well-known artist in Poland since the 1950s, until relatively recently Szapocznikow has remained internationally obscure The trajectory of her marginalisation and rehabilitation is familiar: the double bind of being both Polish and a woman meant she was overlooked by the Western and male-centric gatekeepers of art history, only to be celebrated post mortem Like many women artists who have died young or suffered unfortunate circumstances, such as Ana Mendieta or Francesca Woodman, there is a tendency to view Szapocznikow’s work through her life story, so that her sculptures and drawings become illustrations of this history Her experiences of war and proximity to death undoubtedly influenced her work – and are hard, if not impossible, to untangle from it But to focus solely on biography runs the risk of disregarding her involvement with avant-garde developments: the expansion of sculpture as a non-figurative form, the unconventional use of construction materials (cement, latex, polyester resin, and polyurethane foam), and an