Review of The White Book by Han Kang

*The White Book* by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (2019). Published by Hogarth.

I’m writing this blog post not long after Han Kang officially received the Nobel Prize in Literature, which still feels a little like a fever dream to me. I’ve been reading her work for years, and have been receiving the PR whenever a new novel of hers comes out.

I, like so many others, started out with The Vegetarian. Then I read Greek Lessons when I received an advanced copy of the novel. Then Human Acts, as I found out my library had a spare copy hidden in a dark corner.

I stopped there, but when I was in South Korea the summer of 2024, I was wandering the Incheon Airport with some friends before we headed back home to the United States. We stopped in a bookstore, and I looked at the English language books. I’d already bought quite a few books in Korean back in Busan.

The prices of the books were pretty high for the English copies, so I went with one of the cheaper books, even if it was not entirely what I wanted. That book ended up becoming The White Book, as I figured I could finish it on my extensive journey back to Maryland.

And I did finish it on my many flights! It was a short and brief read—I almost thought it was lyrical essays at first, and didn’t realize it was a novel until I was researching it later.

Let’s get into the review—I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

Through the color white, one writer grapples with family trauma and the pain we inherit.

This is a novel that’s broken up into fragments, which is why it’s so easy to read. Some are very brief, only a paragraph or two long, but others take up entire pages. But this character is grappling specifically with the color of white, so expect some stark and vibrant imagery surrounding this color.

One of the main themes of the novel is how the narrator is trying to think about her mother’s pain with the death of her older sister. We learn about this event, as well as how there always seems to be a bit of a hole ever since then.

Familial trauma is one element of this plot. The narrator is a writer trying to sort through her feelings while at a writing residency, which makes me think that this is Han trying to be more meta through the guise of fiction. If you watch her interviews, she tends to allude to the fact she does this quite a bit.

Something that’s interesting about Han Kang’s work is trying to find the thin line where she inserts part of herself into the narrative directly. In Human Acts, for example, all of the characters are fictional, but she was from Gwangju and definitely heard some stories about it and witnessed the pain of what happened there.

For example, in We Do Not Part, her latest work in translation (at the time of typing this), the narrator is a writer that has written about and done extensive research on the Gwangju Massacres. This is something that Han did when trying to write Human Acts, plus Han Kang is from Gwangju.

This is a novel specifically about grief. There isn’t a coherent plot line beyond the threads that create grief: the loss of the older sister, producing breast milk when there is no baby to give it to, how the snow never seems to end in the writers’ residency over in Warsaw.

But a big part of the journey is seeing how Han tells this tale. I mentioned the imagery before; it’s stunning to read on the page, and can cut right through you at times. It’s hard to pull off a novel centered on color, but she manages to do it quite well.

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed this novel a lot! As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the writing itself is tasteful and done quite well throughout. It’s a very quick read, coming in at about 160 pages total. I read all of it while waiting for my flight from San Francisco to Baltimore.

I think if you’re interested in Han Kang’s work, this might not be the place to start though. My personal favorites of hers are We Do Not Part, which was sent as an advance copy to me, and Human Acts. I study Korean history and did my master’s thesis on colonial and postcolonial Korean women writers, so it’s not surprising these are my favorite Han novels.

But this is a solid entry to her bibliography as well. It’s more emotional to me than her other novels in a way that’s very direct in its grief. Her other work kind of buries it under the plot, embodying the sense of han that many Koreans talk about. Google han as a concept in Korean language—it’s a word about grief, trauma, sadness that permeates modern Korean culture.

Pick this one up if you haven’t already! You won’t regret it if you’re interested in the synopsis.

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