Before the narrator of The White Book is born, her mother has another child; two months premature, the baby dies ‘less than two hours into life’. The narrator is born in the dead baby’s place. ‘This life,’ she writes, in a passage directly addressed to her sister, ‘needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now.’ In small, breath-like fragments, The White Book, written while Han Kang was on a writers’ residency in Warsaw, feels its way through and tries to find meaning in both lives, the narrator’s and her sister’s — or, rather, the single life they have each inhabited, at and for different times.
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith, The White Book follows Kang’s Human Acts, a novel about the 1980 Gwangju massacre, and The Vegetarian, in which a woman rejects meat, for which Kang and Smith won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
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