Books: Han Kang’s The White Book
Han Kang’s The White Book (2017) is an enigmatic trip through grief whose power shines through its prose. Kang experiments with form in a way that made me question how I was meant to be reading. If it were not for the categorization of “novel” printed on the cover I may have assumed it is prose poetry, a book of essays, or memoir. But over the course of the novel Kang plays with this divide between fiction and non-fiction to draw out the sanctity of life. She is haunted by the moments that come between, the transitory place between night and day, life and death.
Han Kang won the Nobel prize for literature in 2024, the first Asian woman and first Korean to receive this award. She began writing poetry in 1993 but has gained notoriety for several novels released in more recent years including The White Book, Human Acts, The Vegetarian, and We Do Not Part. The latter novel was first published in 2021 and received an English translation only last month. Her work is written in Korean and often set in Korea. Although, The White Book does not give many clues as to where it is set.
“Turning to look behind me, I saw the snow already sifting down to cover those just-made prints. Whitening.”
In the first section of the novel we are offered vignettes featuring bold, singular images of life. A stone pebble. Fog. Rime on a window. The book consists of short chapters titled after things which are white: “salt,” “swaddling bands,” “blank paper.” The narrator dwells on memory, fascinated by the color white’s purity and emptiness. She writes, “In the spring, when I decided to write about white things, the first thing I did was make a list.” It is hard to escape the feeling that we are reading a memoir. But with a wandering narrative structure and deeply personal musings, it is hard to place the perspective of our narrator.
“Now I will give you white things,
What is white, though may yet be sullied;
Only white things will I give.
No longer will I question
Whether I should give this life to you.”
Her list of white things carries us through a story of the narrator’s young mother giving birth to a sister who only lives for several hours. This event is the center of the novel, the eye of the hurricane around which all other moments begin to swirl. The language is brief and confident in its power as to only leave us with only a few paragraphs to convey heartbreak. Yet it is still hard to figure out where the “fiction” is in this narrative when the following chapter deals with the memory of the stillborn sister surfacing in our unnamed narrator’s mind during a radio interview. The line between author and narrator feels intentionally blurred.
The next section follows an unnamed “she” moving to a new city, reminiscing on nature and art. Chapters begin to flow into one another like a stream of consciousness. Memories are wrestled with in a way that refuses to give us contextual details. We are only left with the things which remain in one’s head after the years have wiped away the facts of our lives. We are left wondering who is our narrator in this second section. Han Kang? A previous fictional character? A mother? A friend? A sister?
There is beauty in the discovery of reading this novel, so I won’t reveal where Kang takes the narrative. But it is well worth the journey. It feels intimate. It is cryptic and contemplative. Her purpose is to take us to that in-between place that we find ourselves when life does not fit neatly into a box. In The White Book, Kang’s love for life is evident.
“Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces.”
Elijah Kubicek is a junior at Eastern Illinois University and an intern at Bluestem. He is majoring in English with a minor in Film Studies.