The White Book by Han Kang
Penguin Random House, 2019
Think of a color—then, in a sort of automatic reverie, see—what memory first leaps into your mind? Or do the opposite; think of a memory, whether it births a smile or unwinds the marrow of a long-ago scab, and see—in what color is it tinted? For the greater swath of Han Kang’s mind, it would be white.
The White Book by Han Kang is a collection of reminiscence. It is of the color white; the sensation, emotion, sensual and harrowing and quietly painful color white. In this white-laden reality, we follow a nameless narrator, but more so witness her reflections on the sister she never knew. Although a life unfolds, calling it a narrative feels far-fetched—rather, it seems to be a collection of prose poetry, with the themes of family, human frailty, and, of course, white banding together the slowly-falling snowflakes of each musing: “Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives’ miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air.”
A worn-out teat. Bleach-white teeth, suckling. Breast milk. The pale skin of a newborn. Her sister died in her mother’s arms, with just a few hours tacked on existence. An unripe life is a bounty of white—and as life flourishes, from youth to adolescence to middle-age to the elderly, in which finality may occur at any point, a string of white remains present, and silently tightens around the helm of the individual: “her hair would be feather-white. When we’re really old… when every single strand of our hair has gone white, I want to see her then, absolutely.”
Exploring a singular entity—in this work, color—allows a poet to scour its intricacies, her own intricacies, and when the entity is seemingly surface-dwelling, a great deal of other themes often creep beside it in juxtaposition, resulting in white becoming the centerpiece of a table possessing a feast of very human qualities.
Past and present are all blurred and dissolved in a field of snow—and the universal human experience. To Han Kang, white is the inhalation, graceful sorrow is the exhalation. Whether this work is a meditation on the color white, or on being, one cannot be certain. But in The White Book, they are one and the same.
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Jacob Laba is a writer and poet from El Cerrito, California. He has been widely published in journals such as Collidescope, Haiku, Compulsive Reader, and elsewhere.