The White Book// Han Kang

The white book reads like an epitaph, even before you realise it is one. The tensity, the cleanliness, the succinctness and the absolute punch that comes with a delicateness that can only happen if it’s steeped in grief.

The white book is beautiful. People have said it before, and it can’t be more true, each page is art. Woven with the snowy strands of loss in a pattern of melancholy, the white book excels in giving me sentences that are profound yet simple. Placing my cheek on the cool white sheets the way the fog bathes the city in the morning, you would feel it’s only for you.

It’s tricky writing about this book, it’s so perfect in doing what it does with words that anything that one may write about it seems almost ugly. So, I shall stop now.

Please, go read it. Books are seldom as lovely as this.

(A shout out to the book designers. The font, the size, the placement, everything is beautiful and enhances the words with which Han Kang decided to haunt us with.
Also, I have major appreciation for the translator, Deborah Smith. While I can only imagine the beauty of this work in Korean, King has gifted us with this seamless translation that is so pretty that one forgets that this is not the language that the author set out to write in.)

sat in my drafts for far too long