‘The White Book’ Finds Beauty In Loss

The White Book

by Han Kang

Hardcover, 157 pages | purchase

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Han Kang has been a familiar diagnose to Korean readers for two decades, but it ‘s only recently that English-speaking audiences have been able to read her work. She made her major american debut in 2016, when the English translation of her fresh The Vegetarian was released in the States ; the horrifying fib of a charwoman who comes undo after giving up kernel became an improbable break hit. A class by and by, her novel Human Acts followed ; while the subjugate matter was n’t like to The Vegetarian, the critical praise it received was. The latest of Han ‘s novels to be translated into English, The White Book, has about nothing in common with its predecessors except for its spectacularly beautiful writing and its preoccupation with mortality. It ‘s a book that defies genre and challenges the reviewer to make sense of its strange structure. The White Book is n’t likely to appeal to fans of the traditional novel, but will reward readers with a taste for more unconventional narratives. The White Book begins with a number of 15 things associated with the color white : a newborn baby ‘s gown, snow, rice, blank newspaper, and more. “ With each detail I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me, ” the narrator explains. “ I felt that yes, I needed to write this reserve and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform into something like white cream applied to a swell, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed. ”

The narrator, the proofreader learns, is a korean writer living temporarily in a snow-clad european city. recently, she ‘s become haunted with thoughts of her older baby, who died hours after being born : “ The most helpless of all youthful animals. Pretty little baby, flannel as a moon-shaped rice cake. How I ‘d been born and raised in the place of that death. ” The city, one which was about destroyed by the Nazis during World War II, inspires in the narrator thoughts of death and reincarnation. The White Book is broken into several little chapters, most named after a white object, all related in some way to the narrator ‘s family or the city she has found herself in. A chapter named after breast milk takes good seven sentences to recount the narrator ‘s bereaved beget, a day after the death of her baby girl, squeezing out a stream of milk that wo n’t be used to nourish anyone. In “ Blizzard, ” the narrator remembers being stuck in a blizzard in Seoul years ago, “ ineffective to fathom what on earth it could be, this thing so cold, so hostile. This vanishing fragility, this oppressive weight of beauty. ” There ‘s no real plot to The White Book ; in stead of a storyline, Han presents a serial of brief reflections on grief and the challenges of mourning a family penis you ‘ve never met. At times, it seems like more like a poetry collection than anything else — some of the chapters contain line breaks, a technique that Han uses quite efficaciously to catch the reader off guard. Han ‘s fixation on one color and the topic of passing brings to mind Maggie Nelson ‘s 2009 Bluets, a book that besides stubbornly defied music genre classification, though the two books use very different approaches. ‘The White Book ‘ is a fresh that ‘s difficult to describe, but easy to love. It ‘s a delicate book, hard to know, impossible to pin down, but it ‘s filled with some of Han ‘s best publish to date .
But trying to tease out what kind of work The White Book is seems about beside the point — Han ‘s write, and the translation by Deborah Smith, is indeed delicate and gorgeous, it seems a pine away of clock to try to pigeonhole it into any writing style. here ‘s how Han describes an categorization of laundry incidentally dropped from a balcony : “ A unmarried handkerchief drifted down, slowest of all, finally to the ground. Like a bird with its wings half furled. Like a person tentatively sounding out a place it might alight. ” Han finds an devious beauty in each object she considers ; the reviewer is tempted to read each chapter over and all over again equally soon as it ends.

Han is at her haunting best when the narrator considers the baby she never got to know, and how her absence became something like another kin extremity itself. The narrator reflects that if her sister had lived, she might never have been born : “ This life needed entirely one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living nowadays. My life means yours is impossible. ”

The White Book is a fresh that ‘s difficult to describe, but easy to love. It ‘s a delicate koran, hard to know, impossible to pin down, but it ‘s filled with some of Han ‘s best writing to date. And it ‘s besides one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we ‘ve lost. “ There are certain memories that remain intact to the ravages of time. And to those of suffer, ” Han writes. “ It is not genuine that everything is colored by meter and suffer. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin. ”