The White Book by Han Kang (2016)

A meditation on and exploration of life and loss.

Book Review: The White Book is an indescribable mix of memoir, fiction, poetry, nonfiction -- it probably shouldn't even exist. It's much more postmodern and meta than all those postmodern writers you hear about, without even trying. Divided into three sections: "I," "She," "All Whiteness," it's the opened tap of a creative mind, imagination as tangible power, splashed across 157 short pages: "the ruins of seventy years ago might be startled into revealing themselves." Described as a meditation on the color white, that's not quite right. The White Book is meditative, but on life and loss, fragility. Han Kang uses "white" as a mantra to focus her thoughts, part of the semiotics of life, a stimulus to goad her imagination, a totem, a talisman, a conscious breath, a reminder: "The warm white candle wax creeps ever downward ... eventually out of existence." In secular language Kang creates her own religious interpretations. Even the loss of an older sister in infancy which led to Kang's birth, ostensibly the thread of the book, is used to interview a host of issues: "a white butterfly stuttering forward might snatch at her gaze." The White Book is an observation, a memory, memory transformed into possibilities, creating the now, imagination changing reality. Kang uses an isolated time in Warsaw ("I think of her coming here instead of me") much as Federico Garcia Lorca used his visit to New York City (Poeta en Nueva York), to employ the strangeness, the foreign world to free the imagination, unmoored by the familiar. A quiet book, contemplative, virtually plotless, philosophical ("the only things that the mind cannot examine are memories of the future"), sinking deep into the underground streams of life, in lines such as "at some point you will inevitably cast me aside ... and I cannot now return to the time before that knowledge."  [5★]