RaveThe Irish TimesThe weight of this guilt and a cyclical what-might-have-been reverie weighs heavily on these pages ... If this sounds abstract, it is, but it’s done with such tenderness that the reader engages with it, and wants more of this colour-coded analysis. One woman, alone in a city and grieving, incites us to examine our own experience and place in the world: our immediate environment, the past, our experiences of loss. It’s a profound piece of work, and not one that every writer could pull off ... Kang is as concerned with form as much as she is with ideas, something that is evident in her previous work ... The book attempts to confront that sense of blankness, its own white spaces. This is a work that is as much about what is unsaid and omitted, as what Kang directly reveals ... Kang is not interested in sentimentality, but is committed to depth; to expanding our view of the world and the people and things within it, in pristine detail. Memory is complicated, but the colour white is not, and Kang’s painful, exquisite story (translated with such care by Deborah Smith) is a philosophical lament for all the shades of life in between.
