Door. Newborn gown. Moon-shaped rice cake.
Fog. Frost. Wings. Fist.
The story Han Kang has to tell in The White Book is told through the color white.
The white door: scratched-up, rusty.
The moon-shaped rice cake: that’s how a baby’s face looked.
In winter, of course, everything seems to be white. And in a certain kind of darkness “imbued with even the faintest light, even things that would not otherwise be white glow with a hazy pallor.”
The narrator’s ruminations on white objects gradually usher in a character based on her lost sister. Who might the sister have become?
I got this book from the library. There were purple fingerprints on its stark white pages.
The book is short, sparse, consumed in a couple hours. Afterward I waded into Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. She fell in love with the color blue.
You never know what someone is going through. PLEASE READ
The White Book by Han Kang, from Hogarth, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
