This is the third book translated into English by the Korean writer Han Kang. Her previous works are The Vegetarian and Human Acts. I thought the Vegetarian was a little too out there for me and I didn’t really engage with it particularly well, and it’s also quite off-putting by design. But I really liked Human Acts, which told a very human story through an inhuman set of tragedies. This book is somewhere in between. There’s a lot of really interesting writing going on, but the structure and conceit of the book sometimes feels arbitrary and paradoxically contrived.
Here’s the conceit. It’s called The White Book because the book is presented as a set of musings on the color white, a topic I am not actually all the interested in, except that it then compares to other books that do similar things like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and William Gass’s On Being Blue.
But this novel is more novel in its form because the concept of the color white is instead read through the lens of the story of the narrator’s mother’s previous child, who died shortly after birth. And since the only thing I know about the perception of white in Korean culture is that it’s a color of mourning, this makes sense to me. PS – I don’t actually know if this is true or not, but it’s what my perception is gleaned from wider culture. And by wider culture, I mean 30 Rock.
So the narrator makes a list of white things, and then uses that list to tell different parts, sides, and elements of the story of the mother. The most meaningful moment comes when the narrator admits conflicted feelings because the mother’s pain was necessary for their own birth.
I think this book is interesting, but also uneven.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/The-White-Book/dp/1846276292/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1550942683&sr=8-1)