The White Book

Now I will give you white things,

What is white though may yet be sullied;
Only white things will I give.

No longer will I question

Whether I should give this life to you.

I was gobsmacked by the first two books I read by Han Kang – the dreamy and moving The Vegetarian, the forcefully illuminating Human Acts – and I savoured what those two works taught to me of South Korean society. By contrast, The White Book is something totally different: In the blurb, this is described as “both the most autobiographical and the most experimental book to date from South Korean master Han Kang”, and experimental is the key word there. In look and feel and ethos, this is a poetic art project, and as with all art, the consumer's response is highly personal and idiosyncratic. All this to say: Although every published review I found declares The White Book a masterpiece, it didn't do much for me; and while I am prepared to admit that the failings of taste are my own, I do claim them as my own.

This life only needed one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible. Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces.

Just 160 pages, The White Book can be read in less than an hour because it includes many blank pages, whole “chapters” that are just a paragraph long, and interspersed black and white photos (of what turns out to have been a piece of performance art by the author). In my edition, the paper is heavy, smooth, and purest white; a pleasure to hold and handle. The “narrative” is divided into three sections. In the first, “I”, we learn that the narrator is on a writer's retreat in an unfamiliar foreign city (apparently based on Kang's experience in Warsaw) and she is put in mind of the story her mother told her of having given birth to her first child, alone and prematurely in their remote mountain home, and how she handsewed a gown and swaddling wraps for the baby as she lay on the tiled kitchen floor awaiting the birth; clothes that became the baby's funeral shroud as she only lived for two hours. Walking around Warsaw and learning that every building had needed to be rebuilt after WWII, the narrator notes that like these replacement buildings, she would not be around had that first daughter survived; that every stone or pillar that had been repurposed in the city's rebuild are like those parts of herself that she feels were left over from the long gone first daughter. She feels inspired by a list of white things – snow, salt, rice – and decides to reimagine events from her life as though they had been lived by this older sister. This first section was lovely and touching; I thought I knew what I was in for.

The second (and longest) section is called “She”, and the POV shifts to the second person. This is a series of vignettes that expand on the inspirational list of white things – sugar cubes in paper twists while out for tea with her aunt, the frightening flashing silver of an anchovy shoal while out fishing with an uncle who would die too young, musing on the expression “laughing whitely” which she reckons only exists in her mother tongue – and while a few may seem like poems:

Sand

And she frequently forgot,
That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand.
That it had shattered and is shattering still.
Slipping stubbornly through fingers.

Many others are just brief musings:

Breath-cloud

On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living. Proof of our bodies’ warmth. Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives’ miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air.

That each of these brief entries is all that is to be found across three whole pages (a blank facing and following each) appears to be a part of their intended visual impact. I found this section to be interesting, but not especially meaningful to me.

I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn't come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror.

The third, shortest, section is “All Whiteness”, and with a return to the first person POV, the narrator focuses on the domestic: imagining what it would have been like growing up with an onni (older sister), performing funerary rites for their dead mother with her younger brother (who also would never have been born if their two older siblings had survived), tying her own son into the story, determining to keep the onni alive on the white page. And, again, none of this was particularly meaningful to me. The series of photographs end with Kang sitting with bowed head before the white baby garment she has been crafting and has hung on a blank wall, and while I respect the solemnity of the intent, I didn't connect to this as an exploration of grief as others apparently have: can you truly grieve for someone who died long before you were born? Again, I will allow that my skepticism reflects nothing more than the state of my own prunish heart; but again, I do claim that as my own.