The White Book

by Han Kang, Deborah Smith (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A remarkable meditation on life, death, loss and memory from the author of Human Acts.

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
 
“[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “formally daring, emotionally devastating, and deeply political” (The New York Times Book Review) exploration of personal grief through the prism of the color white, from the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian

“Stunningly beautiful writing . . . delicate and gorgeous . . . one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we’ve lost.”—NPR
 
While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us.
 
In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781846276958
Publisher:	Granta Books
Publication date:	04/05/2018
Sales rank:	66,823
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, and We Do Not Part. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Read an Excerpt

1

In the spring, when I decided to write about white things, the first thing I did was make a list.

Swaddling bands
Newborn gown
Salt
Snow
Ice
Moon
Rice
Waves
Yulan
White bird
“Laughing whitely”
Blank paper
White dog
White hair


Shroud

With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt that yes, I needed to write this book and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed. 

But then, a few days later, running my eyes over that list again, I wondered what meaning might lie in this task, in peering into the heart of these words.

If I sift those words through myself, sentences will shiver out, like the strange, sad shriek the bow draws from a metal string. Could I let myself hide between these sentences, veiled with white gauze? 

This was difficult to answer, so I left the list as it was and put off anything more. I came abroad in August, to this country I’d never visited before, got a short-term lease on an apartment in its capital, and learned to draw out my days in these strange environs. One night almost two months later, when the season’s chill was just beginning to bite, a migraine set in, viciously familiar. I washed down some pills with warm water and realized (quite calmly) that hiding would be impossible.

Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness. The migraines that began when I was twelve or thirteen swoop down without warning, bringing with them agonizing stomach cramps that stop daily life in its tracks. Even the smallest task is left suspended as I concentrate on simply enduring the pain, sensing time’s discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones, grazing my fingertips. One deep breath drawn in and this new moment of life takes shape as distinctly as a bead of blood. Even once I have stepped back into the flow, one day melding seamlessly into another, that sensation remains ever there in that spot, waiting, breath held.

Each moment is a leap forward from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way. Now, in this moment, I feel that vertiginous thrill course through me. As I step recklessly into time I have not yet lived, into this book I have not yet written.


Door

This was something that happened a long time ago.

Before signing the contract for the lease, I went to look at the apartment again.

Its metal door had once been white, but that brightness had faded over time. It was a mess when I saw it, paint flaking off in patches to reveal the rust beneath. And if that had been all, I would have remembered it as nothing more than a scruffy old door. But there was also the way its number, 301, had been inscribed.

Someone—perhaps another in a long line of temporary occupants—had used some sharp implement, maybe a drill bit, to scratch the number into the door’s surface. I could make out each individual stroke: 3, itself three hand spans high; 0, smaller, yet gone over several times, a fierce scrawl that attracted attention. Finally, 1, a long, deep-gouged line, taut with the effort of its making. Along this collection of straight and curved wounds rust had spread, a vestige of violence, like long-dried bloodstains, hardened, reddish-black. I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life. Those numbers were glaring at me, clenching their teeth shut tight.

That was the apartment I wanted that winter, the apartment where I’d chosen to spin out my days.

As soon as I’d unpacked, I bought a can of white paint and a good-size paintbrush. Neither the kitchen nor the bedroom had been repapered, and their walls were spotted with stains large and small. These dark splotches were especially conspicuous around any electrical switches. I wore pale gray tracksuit pants and an old white sweater, so the splatters wouldn’t show up too badly. Even before I’d started to paint, I was unconcerned with achieving a neat, even finish. It would be enough, I reasoned, just to paint over the stains—surely white splotches are better than dirty ones? I swept my brush over the large patches on the ceiling where the rain must have seeped through at one time, watching gray disappear beneath white. I gave the sink’s grubby bowl a wipe with a washcloth before painting it that same bright white, never mind that its pedestal was brown.

Finally, I stepped out into the corridor to paint the front door. With each swish of the brush over the scar-laced surface, its imperfections were erased. Those deep-gouged numbers disappeared, those rusted bloodstains vanished. I went back inside the apartment to take a break and get warm, and when I came back out an hour later I saw that the paint had run. It looked untidy, probably because I was using a brush rather than a roller. After painting an extra coat over the top so the streaks were less visible, I went back inside to wait. Another hour went by before I shuffled out in my slippers. Snow had begun to scatter down. Outside, the alley had darkened; the streetlights were not yet on. Paint can in one hand, brush in the other, I stood unmoving, a dumb witness to the snowflakes’ slow descent, like hundreds of feathers feathering down.


Swaddling bands

Swaddling bands white as snow are wound around the newborn baby. The womb will have been such a snug fit, so the nurse binds the body tight, to mitigate the shock of its abrupt projection into limitlessness.

Person who begins only now to breathe, a first filling-up of the lungs. Person who does not know who they are, where they are, what has just begun. The most helpless of all young animals, more defenseless even than a newborn chick.

The woman, pale from blood loss, looks at the crying child. Flustered, she takes its swaddled self into her arms. Person to whom the cure of this crying is as yet unknown. Who has been, until mere moments ago, in the throes of such astonishing agony. Unexpectedly, the child quiets itself. It will be because of some smell. Or that the two are still connected. Two black unseeing eyes are turned toward the woman’s face—drawn in the direction of her voice. Not knowing what has been set in motion, these two are still connected. In a silence shot through with the smell of blood. When what lies between two bodies is the white of swaddling bands.


Newborn gown

My mother’s first child died, I was told, less than two hours into life.

I was told that she was a girl, with a face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake. Though she was very small, two months premature, her features were clearly defined. I can never forget, my mother told me, the moment she opened her two black eyes and turned them toward my face.
At the time, my parents were living in an isolated house, in the countryside near the elementary school where my father taught. My mother’s due date was still far off, so she was completely unprepared when, one morning, her water broke. There was no one around. The village’s sole telephone was in a tiny shop by the bus stop—twenty minutes away. My father wouldn’t be back from work for another six hours.

It was early winter, the first frost of the year. My twenty-two-year-old mother crawled into the kitchen and boiled some water to sterilize a pair of scissors. Fumbling in her sewing box, she found some white cloth that would do for a newborn’s gown. Gripped by contractions and terribly afraid, she plied her needle as tears started down. She finished the tiny gown, found a thin quilt to use as swaddling bands, and gritted her teeth as the pain returned, quicker and more intense each time.

Eventually, she gave birth. Still alone, she cut the umbilical cord. She dressed the bloodied little body in the gown she’d just made, and held the whimpering scrap in her arms. For God’s sake don’t die, she muttered in a thin voice, over and over like a mantra. After an hour had passed, the baby’s tight-sealed eyelids abruptly unseamed. As my mother’s eyes met those of her child, her lips twitched again. For God’s sake don’t die. Around an hour later, the baby was dead. They lay there on the kitchen floor, my mother on her side with the dead baby clutched to her chest, feeling the cold gradually enter into the flesh, sinking through to the bone. No more crying.

Editorial Reviews

The Vegetarian and Human Acts introduced English-language readers to the explosive fiction of the South Korean writer Han Kang. Although her new novel, The White Book, occupies a somewhat quieter register, it too is formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political. Its relative smallness of scale—a scant 157 pages, cut to fit in the palm of the hand—is deceptive, itself the mark of a supremely confident writer…Among other things, The White Book is an urgent plea for the ritual power of mourning—for its significance in terms of both personal and historical restitution…In this subtle and searching novel, Han…proposes a model of genuine empathy, one that insists on the power of shared experience but is not predicated on the erasure of difference.

The New York Times Book Review - Katie Kitamura

★ 03/18/2019

Far from a traditional novel in its presentation, the engrossing latest from Man Booker International winner Han (The Vegetarian) fills spare pages with sometimes poetic meditations on the possibilities of a life unlived. After traveling to Warsaw from South Korea and renting an apartment, Han’s unnamed narrator remembers the story of her parents’ first child, a girl who died shortly after birth. The narrator investigates her own grief regarding this child to conjure a possible alternate timeline wherein the baby lived. The narrator looks through the eyes of this new person, wandering the foreign city, observing the snowy season developing around her, and using objects like “Sleet,” “Salt,” and “Sugar cubes” as titles to anchor each section. The narrator crafts an entire life for this lost sister before turning her considerations inward, asking if she would have been conceived if the child had survived. Han breaks her narrative into three parts, “I,” “She,” and “All Whiteness,” and throughout writes with attention to the whiteness of the page. The second section, in particular, is wintery in presentation, with small blocks of black text floating atop swaths of blankness. Though thin on conventional narrative, the novel resonates as a prayer for the departed, and only gains power upon rereading. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between place, history and memory . . . Poised and never flinches from serene dignity . . . The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book. . . . Translated peerlessly by Smith, [it] succeeds in reflecting Han’s urgent desire to transcend pain with language.”—The Guardian

“With eloquence and grace, Han breathes life into loss and fills the emptiness with this new work.”—Library Journal

“Everything I ever thought about the color white has been profoundly altered by reading Han Kang’s brilliant exploration of its meaning and the ways in which white shapes her world, from birth to death—including the death of The White Book’s narrator’s older sister, who died just a few hours after she was born, in her mother’s arms. This is an unforgettable meditation on grief and memory, resilience and acceptance, all offered up in Han’s luminous, intimate prose.”—Nylon
 
“Han’s first two English-language translations were instant sensations, establishing her as a riveting practitioner of the surreal and of historical fiction alike. Her latest . . . is told by a woman haunted by the death of her elder sister just after birth—a contemplation of life, death, resilience and, as the title hints, color.”—HuffPost

“[The White Book] promises to be equal parts Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and something entirely Han Kang’s own. . . . A quieter, yet just as intensely symbolic, follow-up to the startling violence of her first two books.”—LitHub

“A quietly gripping contemplation on life, death, and the existential impact of those who have gone before.”—Eimear McBride, author of The Lesser Bohemians

“The White Book is a profound and precious thing, its language achingly intimate, each image haunting and true. It is a remarkable achievement. Han Kang is a genius.”—Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

“Kang’s masterful voice is captivating and nothing short of brilliant.”—Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher

This brief novel—shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—is a haunting meditation on loss and memory, movingly narrated by Jennifer Kim. Even though the unnamed narrator of the story is a successful author, she reflects on her life and how aimless she has become. In many passages she ponders the color white—snow, an empty sheet of white paper, an infant’s swaddling clothes. She believes this rootlessness began before her own birth, when an older sister died soon after being born, forcing the narrator to recognize that, if things had been different, she herself might never have existed. Kim’s voice gives the story the immediacy of a recent loss but also the joy of finding a relationship, no matter how ephemeral, with the sister she never met. A rare treat for listeners. D.G.P. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

This brief novel—shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—is a haunting meditation on loss and memory, movingly narrated by Jennifer Kim. Even though the unnamed narrator of the story is a successful author, she reflects on her life and how aimless she has become. In many passages she ponders the color white—snow, an empty sheet of white paper, an infant’s swaddling clothes. She believes this rootlessness began before her own birth, when an older sister died soon after being born, forcing the narrator to recognize that, if things had been different, she herself might never have existed. Kim’s voice gives the story the immediacy of a recent loss but also the joy of finding a relationship, no matter how ephemeral, with the sister she never met. A rare treat for listeners. D.G.P. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile