Love in Yeosu (1995) • Black Deer (1998) • Baby Buddha (1999) • Fruits of My Woman (2000) • My Name Is Sun Flower (2002) • Your Cold Hands (2002) • Love and Things Surrounding Love (2003) • The Red Flower Story (2003) • The Vegetarian (2007) • Tear Box (2008) • The Wind Blows, Go (2010) • Greek Lessons (2011) • Yellow Pattern Eternity (2012) • I Put the Evening in the Drawer (2013) • Human Acts (2014) • The White Book (2016) • dear son my beloved (2019) • Convalescence (2013/20) • Europa (2014/19) • We Do Not Part (2021) •
Title: The White Book
Author: Han Kang
First Published: 2016, as 흰 (Heuin) - translates into White or Whiteness, Munhakdongne Publishing Group
Present Library Copy: Hogarth Press, 2019
Translation: Deborah Smith, 2017
Language: English from Korean
Genre: Autofiction, Lyric Essay
Place of Writing: Warsaw, Poland (2013)
Pages: 160
ISBN: 978-0-525-57306-7
Notes | Like her earlier works—especially The Vegetarian and Human Acts—The White Book continues her exploration of trauma, absence, and the body, but does so with a more meditative and fragmentary form. It blurs the boundary between fiction and memoir, using sparse, poetic prose to reflect on the death of an unnamed infant sister and the ways grief lingers across generations and geographies.
While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us.
In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
“Formally daring, emotionally devastting, and deeply political”
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review