‘Now I will give you white things’: a review of Han Kang’s The White Book
For Han Kang, white is no ‘original’ surface, no canvas; it conceals. It is snow, cloud, white fur over pink skin, ‘a whiteout inside his head’, ‘feathers feathering down’. The beauty of the book as a physical object (like every Portobello edition) makes you constantly aware of its whiteness; the binding is white, the cover — and half of the pages are blank, untouched by the brief vignettes. Except that, in one of Kang’s own formulations, the text is ‘black writing bleeding through thin paper’. Her words, with effort and pain, reveal themselves from behind hundreds of white shells.
By Oscar Farley.