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. The White Book — slim, fragmented, interspersed with black and white photographs of a performance in which Kang hunches and crouches over pieces of white-grey material and foods — is quieter and subtler; it is meditative and slow and deeply personal.
This is both an autobiographical book and a work of fiction. In a foreign city, haunted by ghosts from its own tragic past, Kang imagines her sister, a spirit, ‘hovering at [her] forehead’, walking through Warsaw in her place, seeing and experiencing the things Kang comes into contact with. (In Warsaw — a city that was destroyed in 1944 and reconstructed — Kang also sees reflected her sister’s life, its destruction and its reconstruction into a life for herself.)
Kang shows her sister objects significant to their shared life.
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