An astonishingly rendered work of fiction, as much a meditation as a narrative ... Precise, subversive, fierce and deceptively opaque ... There is a heaviness in these pages, teamed with wonder; a fragile coexistence from sentence to sentence ... is not without hope. In its own way the novel is a sublime expression of grief’s incongruous byways, its busy inactivity, its larger, more elaborate intrusions.
Although [Han Kang's] new novel, The White Book, occupies a somewhat quieter register [than her previous work], it too is formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political. Its relative smallness of scale — a scant 157 pages, cut to fit in the palm of the hand — is deceptive, itself the mark of a supremely confident writer ... What follows is a text shot through with 'vertiginous thrill' ... In this subtle and searching novel, Kang, through Smith, proposes a model of genuine empathy, one that insists on the power of shared experience but is not predicated on the erasure of difference.
... stunningly beautiful writing ... The White Book isn't likely to appeal to fans of the traditional novel, but will reward readers with a taste for more unconventional narratives ... Han's writing, and the translation by Deborah Smith, is so delicate and gorgeous, it seems a waste of time to try to pigeonhole it into any genre ... The White Book is a novel that's difficult to describe, but easy to love. It's a delicate book, hard to know, impossible to pin down, but it's filled with some of Han's best writing to date. And it's also one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we've lost.
Through these beautifully crafted snapshots, Kang uses language to attempt to transcend the different stages of grief and pain. She explores the dichotomies of black and white, life and death, and the pristine and tragic symbolism that runs between them. Kang’s masterful voice is captivating and nothing short of brilliant.
The 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.
The result is mesmerizing ... At times a string of sentences or an image created is so startlingly beautiful that it demands not only a lengthy pause in which to ponder its meaning, but a multitude of readings ... As a package, Kang’s ghostly The White Book is a force to be reckoned with. It demands every bit of your attention. But it also accomplishes something quite unique. It flows through your consciousness like a snowflake, a white butterfly, that handkerchief — settling there, then floating away up into the ether.
As the story develops, the narrator’s incantatory invocation of white objects—salt, snow, moon, ice, rice, waves, white hair, a white dog—gradually envelops the reader like the creeping Warsaw fog that slowly rubs away the borders between sky and earth ... With its blend of fiction, non-fiction, and autobiography, non-linear narrative, and juxtaposition of text and photographic images, The White Book reveals Kang to be an innovative author committed to formal experimentation ... Intensely personal, hypnotically serene, and mournfully meditative, Kang’s thanatopsis reminds readers of the revivifying power of memory and the extent to which we are uniquely endowed within the natural world to withstand the vagaries of forgetfulness and life’s nagging ephemerality.
At its most engaging, the writing edges close to becoming a brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between place, history and memory. If Han’s monotone is relentlessly poised and never flinches from serene dignity, perhaps it could not be written in any other way ... a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book. I admire its intention, form and purpose. Some of the most affecting writing comes when the narrator speaks directly to her baby sister ... Translated seamlessly by Smith, The White Book succeeds in reflecting Han’s urgent desire to transcend pain with language.
... stark and lyrical ... In its directness (I would even say a kind of imagist plainspeak), economy, and phrasal cadences, Deborah Smith’s translation has captured much ... A qualm or two, though: the rendering of a young mother’s desperate and feeble plea—and a refrain/mantra throughout—as “For God’s sake don’t die,” seems an unnecessary Anglicization ... To add 'the book' feels imprecise, redundant. It’s possible that Han herself is trying to bend grammar, as she does genre... Still, the sense of an unfixed adjective as attributive and modifying, denoting the quality of the thing and not the thing itself, is lost, as they say, in translation.
The White Book—which, like all monochromatic meditations, is both about its color and about other matters entirely—is a novel of birth and death in quick succession, circumscribed by another’s life ... The White Book, which is resolutely plotless, follows the narrator’s reckoning with this consuming grief ... whiteness is not simply purity, but something else—something inflected with the inextricability of the living from the dead, the reconstruction from the ruin. Like the color itself, it’s not something that can be accessed directly.
Feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place ... for a moment, the book becomes a candle in the reader’s hands—a flickering white light that is lovely and mournful all at once ... calls to mind Maggie Nelson’s Bluets ... It is her third collaboration with her translator Deborah Smith and readers of The Vegetarian and Human Acts can expect the same linguistic grace. However, while the first two books were clearly novels, The White Book is slippery. It is listed as fiction, but could easily be read as poetry or a collection of lyrical essays ... a work that inspires the reader to be kinder to all that is ephemeral in the world.
Unlike 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.
Kang's most experimental fictional work to date ... [Kang's] characteristically poetic writing, driven by the visual ornaments of the colour white, is most potent in short fragments. And the language avoids being ornate, a task made difficult without a linear plot driving the story ... It would be easy to rely on traditional associations of the colour white, but Kang's book neither toys with them nor attempts to redefine them ... a story of devotion, a most beautiful eulogy honouring the one that came before her.
