Jessie Neilson reviews The White Book by Han Kang, published by Granta/Allen & Unwin.
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."
Han Kang’s older sister, her onni, with a face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake, lived less than two hours. Their mother’s first child, she had her swaddling bands wrapped around her, to emulate the condition within the womb.
Kang proposes this work as one transformative and healing, like gauze laid over a wound. She hopes that if she sifts words through herself she will come to some knowledge. Sentences will shiver out.
The streets of the city are snow-covered, a soundless state with "an equal absence of joy or sorrow, and the street’s erasure is complete". Yet, in describing exterior states they only mask her own retreat into her own interior; the "muffled early-morning hours" and the ghosts of the city a time and condition of thinking.
She makes an inventory of white objects that are motifs in her life. Black and white photographs accompany, and are simple and wordless: of a hand holding a pebble, or a woman bent over, creating, in a dimly-lit gallery room, where even in darkness certain objects appear white.
It is not only the pain of losing her older sister and an alternative scenario that preoccupies the author. She is haunted by the ghosts of Germany and World War 2, picturing warm white candle wax creeping ever downwards; a shortening of life and memory. More immediately, she is permanently affected by the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, a formative event in her home town, when thousands of students rose up in a peaceful show of democracy and many were gunned down under the militant leadership of General Chun Doo-hwan. Her family had only recently moved from Gwangju to Seoul, and this event thereafter has symbolised for her "all that has been mutilated beyond repair".
Kang was born into a family of writers, and she has attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She and her partner in translation, Deborah Smith, together claimed the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, making her the first Korean writer to do so. Smith has been charged with rendering Kang’s works entirely different products — of turning the simplicity and understatedness of the Korean originals into florid, poeticised embellishments. Korean academic and translator Charse Yun likens the process to a Carver work being turned into one by Dickens, yet Yun mostly comes out in favour of the secondary product regardless. Any interpretation is going to be its own creative work in itself, whatever its honouring of the original.
The White Book hardly resembles The Vegetarian at all, save that they are both novellas, and both share a curious creative seed in Kang’s frequent migraines, which she says are a vital impetus for her fevered work. The White Book, in Korean simply "Huin", or white, is much less disturbing, and seeks less of a narrative, appearing more as a brief whisper or a meditation, on grief, remembrance, and the dignity of the human condition.
- Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
