It seeks to fix memories that, like the recollection of “a dish of wrapped sugar cubes”, will “remain inviolate to the ravages of time”. With its brief, lyrical sections, its scatter of enigmatic photographs, “The White Book” feels less like a novel than a manual of wisdom, even of prayer. Readers of Ms Han’s novels “Human Acts” and “The Vegetarian” (the second of which won the Man Booker International Prize) will know that each of her books creates a unique frame for its theme.

Amid images of ice and ashes, rice and salt, cloud and moon, the “white things” that signify mourning in Korean and other Asian traditions, the woman learns how “to light a candle for all the deaths and spirits she can remember-including her own.” Its snow-crystals of prose settle into an eerily moving sequence of meditations on destruction, bereavement and rebirth. The baby girl had “a face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake”.įrom these dual dimensions of grief and memory, one personal and one historical, Han Kang, a South Korean writer, has fashioned a winter book made up of beautiful, tantalising fragments. During this spell of exile, she recalls the sibling she never met: her mother’s first child, who died “less than two hours into life”. To be published in America by Hogarth in 2019.Ī WOMAN wanders through the snowbound streets of a European city that, in the second world war, suffered such wholesale obliteration that “the white glow of stone ruins” stretched “as far as the eye could see”.

The white book by han kang