The White Book by Han Kang

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was a hit with the English-speaking audience when the English translation by Deborah Smith was published back in 2016. Her other novel, The White Book, which is also translated by Deborah Smith, defies any conceptions that a reader has of the form of a book. One could see The White Book as a novel, as a poetry volume with prose poems or even like a creative non-fictional journal where the author meditates about her surroundings and several other preoccupations that her churning mind throws up within.

Because of the ambiguity around the form of the book itself, it immediately engages the reader, compels one who picks up the book to choose, decide and think for oneself the boundaries between various forms and between fiction and non-fiction.

I read The White Book as more of a volume of poems where the author uses prose poems as a style of expression. I don’t think it registered in my mind to read it as a novel at all. This could be because of the brevity of words and more blank space on each page instead of the pages being crowded with sentences and phrases as a novel would usually be. Perhaps, the book looks different when it was written in Korean? Who knows? I don’t have access to that version. Nonetheless it was unique to dwell on how we perceive different forms and styles of books in the way they have been normatively presented to us and how we put those features in distinct categories.

Kang begins this novel (or poetry volume to me) with an introduction where she talks about moving to a snow-covered European city and elucidates her intention to write thematically about all the things associated with the colour, white, be it rice or moon or snow. And perhaps owing to this theme of depicting white in its various forms, and owing to the connotations white has across cultures, The White Book allows the reader several moments of poignant pauses to breathe in the peace or the succinct observation that the poems and words emanate.

The White Book is divided into three parts and one of the other thematic preoccupations of this work is the speaker or Kang’s reflections about her older sister who died only a few hours after being born.

Kang tries walking in her sister’s shoes, breathes life into her through the poems and it would seem that she even replaces Kang as the one living in the city and enjoying the sights and sounds. The older sister then becomes a flaneuse of sorts, “walking this city’s streets until her calves had grown stiff” (from the poem/chapter titled, “Fist”).
Kang envisions through the poems her sister’s life, how her mother dealt with her birth, how Kang herself feels indelibly connected with her and even owes her existence to her sister’s death:

“If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible”

 – (From an untitled poem in the last part of the book titled, “All Whiteness”).

This tenuous connection that Kang has with the older dead sister, that she literally owes her life to her is deeply haunting, one that I have also mused about given that I too had an older brother (not sister) who died after a few days (not a few hours) of birth. I have often wondered how my existence would be simply erased if life was granted to someone else. Such musings that reveal to you the strange workings of fate are no doubt deeply haunting, and perhaps suffused Kang with guilt; enough of it that she was compelled to imagine, through verse, a life that could have been lived in her stead.

Other than the whiteness and the theme of an older sister, the book has no single plot and each poem revels in a poignant observation of seemingly mundane occurrences in the city or elsewhere. But Kang deftly shows the similar through the lens of defamilarisation, such that the reader is immediately moved to a border where all the events in the poems look familiar, but are unfamiliar at the same time.  For example, the opening poem or chapter if you like, “Door” describes the rust on the door in the following manner:

“…rust had spread, a vestige of violence, like long-dried bloodstains, hardened, reddish-black.”

Though this example might seem unlike the peace that the sense of whiteness brings, it lends to how Kang maneuvers her way with words to show the borders of the familiar and unfamiliar. Her descriptions of snow and of how people observe that snow (especially first snow) allows the reader a pause to contemplate on how they also observe the things of nature.

Yet the mundane is also what pulls The White Book down especially when the defamiliarisation style fades and it becomes a mere description of a thing that happens to us all daily; a description that adds no value or thought to that lived mundane reality. This would perhaps be the only drawback of this genre-defying book: that at times the words only shine through in moments, in lines that clinch a powerful merging of observation and imagination but at times that same merging can peter out into the most rudimentary of descriptions as well.

Other than that, The White Book is a beautiful, thought-provoking work constantly invoking that ‘aha’ moment or evoking the depth of the most basic of all emotions within our hidden recesses. It will provide you a much-needed break from all the dreariness around us at this time and is a definite recommendation particularly if you want some inspiration to pen down some words yourself about all the gloom you feel around you amidst the raging pandemic.