The White Book
Han Kang, Deborah Smith (translation)Hang Kan investigates the fragility, beauty & strangeness of life in a contemplation of memory, loss & the lives that leave this world before us.
Translated by Deborah Smith.
An unnamed narrator moves to a European city where she is haunted by the story of her older sister, who died a mere two hours after birth. As she contemplates the child’s short life she focuses on whiteness and all it symbolises. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. It is a book about mourning, rebirth & the tenacity of the human spirit.
"An astonishingly rendered work of fiction, as much a meditation as a narrative ... Precise, subversive, fierce and deceptively opaque ... There is a heaviness in these pages, teamed with wonder; a fragile coexistence from sentence to sentence ... is not without hope. In its own way the novel is a sublime expression of grief’s incongruous byways, its busy inactivity, its larger, more elaborate intrusions." - Catherine Taylor, Financial TImes
Han Kang is a South Korean writer. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University & her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, & the Korean Literature Novel Award. She is also the author of Human Acts & The White Book. The Vegetarian is her first novel to be translated into English.
Deborah Smith’s literary translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang (The Vegetarian & Human Acts), & two by Bae Suah (A Greater Music & Recitation). She also recently founded Tilted Axis Press to bring more works from Africa, Asia, & the Middle East into English.