Review | Man Booker winner’s new book a heartbreaking meditation on baby sister who died hours after birth

The White Book
by Han Kang
Portobello Books

Here are a few things that The White Book by Han Kang is not. It isn’t very long – just 128 relatively unpacked pages. Most individual sections last fewer than three pages, and many barely trouble much more than a single sheet of “black writing through white paper” (to quote one chapter title).

Nor is it very conversational, either in terms of dialogue or tone. A typical example of oblique lyricism inquires how the ghosts of a particular city behave in an early morning fog: “Do they greet each other, through the gaps between those water molecules which bleach their voices white?”

If your taste runs to, say, Lee Child or even Han’s own prize-winning international breakthrough, The Vegetarian (winner of 2016’s Man Booker International Prize), you may doubt whether The White Book is a novel at all. It seems to have more in common with the short, avant garde “fizzles” of Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1967) and later prose works, the precise, laser-guided sentences of which feel like poetry, albeit without rhymes and line breaks.

Finally, there is no obvious plot, story or narrative. An unnamed woman, possibly Han, though it needn’t be, wanders through an unnamed European city (possibly Warsaw) destroyed by the Nazis in the second world war and ponders the brittleness of the world.

As Han’s focus alternates between inner and outer worlds, personal time and the historical, other locations and preoccupations arise, including South Korea’s Gwangju massacre, which inspired her previous book, Human Acts (2014). What connects one to the next is a preoccupation with white – as metaphor, material presence and ephemeral absence.