The White Book
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Published in 2016, The White Book is one of Han Kang’s most intimate and formally daring works: a luminous meditation on grief, memory and the fragile persistence of life. Written during a residency in Warsaw, the book follows a nameless narrator through a city marked by the devastation of war, as she reflects on the older sister she never knew—a baby who died only hours after birth. Moving through a sequence of brief, interconnected pieces devoted to white things, from salt and snow to a newborn’s clothes and the light of the moon, Kang gradually gives shape to an absence that has haunted her family.
Part novel, part prose poem and part lyrical essay, The White Book finds extraordinary emotional depth in its attention to the smallest details. White becomes both a language of mourning and a possibility of renewal, holding together innocence and death, destruction and tenderness. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, it offers a quieter but no less affecting expression of the concerns that run through Kang’s work: the body, suffering, remembrance and the limits of language.
From the book
“On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living.”
— Han Kang, The White Book
On The White Book
“The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book.”
— Deborah Levy, The Guardian