The White Book by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) ~Janet Brown

White is an enigma. Is it a color or is it an absence of color? This makes it an appropriate preoccupation for this enigmatic little book, which at first reveals no gender for its narrator, no name for the city in which it is set, and no plot. Instead it begins with a list of things that are white and a few spoken words that are repeated throughout The White Book: “Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die.”

White is the color of purity and the color of death. Death is the prevailing theme for the narrator. Her mother at the age of twenty-two gave birth to her first child, alone.  She dressed the baby girl in a white gown she had made while racked with labor pains and wrapped the newborn in ribbons of cloth cut from a white quilt to serve as swaddling bands. The baby, born two months early, her “face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake,” lived for only a couple of hours. That night her father buried her on a mountainside. Her “gown became her shroud. Her swaddling bands became a coffin.” Her death made way for the narrator’s own life and this fact haunts the white view of a book that the author describes as “a kind of essay-cum-prose poem.” “My life means yours is impossible.”

Snowfall obscures the novel’s setting, a “white city” which was so thoroughly destroyed by Hitler, “literally pulverized,” that before it was rebuilt, “the white glow of stone ruins” was all that remained. Walking through it brings the knowledge that every part of the landscape was once dead and was “painstakingly reconstructed.” The wings of a solitary white butterfly loses their  whiteness as they slowly freeze on the outskirts of the city, becoming “close to transparent…something other, no longer wings,” and snow falls “with an equal absence of joy or sorrow.”

The narrator turns into “she” with a view of whiteness that is less apocalyptic. A “white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living.” A white pebble found on a beach is seen as what silence would be if “it were condensed into the smallest, most solid object.” “Black writing through white paper” makes her understand that “learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.” She explores the art of “laughing whitely…laughter that is faint, cheerless.”

Han Kung has admitted that The White Book is somewhat autobiographical. She was born after a sister who died before she had taken three hours of breath and that dead infant lives within these pages, as “she,” who sees the beauty and promise that lies within whiteness. Kung wrote this novel while living within this “city of severe winters,” that sprang into new life after all but a tiny fraction was demolished in warfare, when she was given a writer’s residency in Warsaw. 

In sixty-five short pieces, Kang examines grief, guilt, and the life that lies within whiteness. Presented as a novel, its essence is poetry, imagist language clad in thought, showing the perfection of a sugar cube, a glacier…sacred, unsullied by life,” “the impossibility of forever.”