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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 want you to be in my writing Maybe not you exactly Someone like you Will you like this version of you? Maybe not Will you recognise this version of you, as you? I hope so She has some of your qualities I say she because you are a trans woman, and it’s something about trans women that I’m writing Maybe you are central to it, or maybe incidental Either way, you figure in the text What makes me think I know anything about you? And what makes what I think I know something I can put in a piece of writing to which I own the rights?   As it happens, I’m a trans woman too Yay for girls like us! We’re at the bar at Mood Ring I buy us drinks Once our server is out of earshot, we dish I’m sorry you got harassed on the subway That happened to me just last week Oh, we saw the same surgeon His office never returns your calls It’s hilarious that we both fucked that other trans girl – she sure gets around Ah, but you have some stories I don’t Now, honey, tell me all about your pain   Wait, something’s wrong here If this is our shared story, why do I need you to tell it so that I can write it? Because of things we don’t have in common I’m white, middle-class by origin, with a good education, living in an apartment my partner and I own I transitioned late after securing a comfortable life In a word: bourgeois A bourgeois life brings relative freedom from pain But it’s boring This is the dilemma constitutive of bourgeois literature So I look to you for a good story I have the luxury of having feelings about other people’s feelings To feel, but also to judge, at some remove It will be your story, in my text – and my copyright It’s the business of bourgeois literature to stake claims to property rights over others’ pain   I don’t know that a book can even make a claim