RaveThe New StatesmanFeels at times like a painstaking description of a cinematic art installation. Birds become symbols of fragile hope and dogged survival ... This disorientating, deeply metaphorical world, obliquely concerned with specific atrocities in Korean history, must have been an immense challenge to translate ... Highly original and moving.
Han Kang, Trans. by Deborah Smith
PositiveThe New StatesmanUnlike her previous novels, [The White Book] neither bears witness to the living nor commemorates the dead but, through a series of trance-like vignettes, consecrates the never-lived ... a profound, beautiful and doomed project ... Time after time, Han’s writing grapples with the insoluble, overwrought nature of trauma. If I have one criticism of the book, it is that I’m not sure about the inclusion of seven black-and-white photos of a woman (presumably Han) holding various objects that appear elsewhere in the novel – a white pebble, swaddling bands, a newborn’s gown. They hint at a misjudged lack of confidence in the words (which have, once again, been beautifully translated by Deborah Smith) ... Han’s non-linear, disembodied prose is the perfect medium wherein the sisters can coexist.
