During her stay in a European city marked by the violence of World War II, in a city with harsh winters, the author confronts another tragedy that shaped her family's path: the death of her older sister, who left the world just two hours after her birth. In an autobiographical and fragmented narrative, polished and heartrending, emerging from white images—the swaddling clothes that became a shroud, the mother's milk the baby never got to drink, a handful of words on paper—the Nobel laureate author brings to life the memory of a sister she never had the chance to meet, thus transforming, simply and poetically, a deeply personal subject into high literature. "I grew up within this story," she writes. "The White Book" is a lyrical reflection on mourning, but also on the resilience of the human soul, on the ceaseless effort to create new life from the ashes of destruction. The edition is complemented by the beautiful lecture Han Kang gave as part of her Nobel Prize in Literature award.
If you had lived,
I would not exist.
If I live, it means
that you cannot exist.
Only for a moment, fleetingly, in that
bluish void between light
and darkness, can we
discern each other.
"When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory stimuli of sight, hearing, smell, taste, I feel tenderness and warmth, cold and pain, I listen to the beats of my heart, I observe my body's need for food and water, the way I walk or run, the sensation of air, rain, or snowflakes on my skin, the feeling of a hand in mine. Everything I vividly perceive as a mortal being with blood running through my veins, I try to instill into my sentences."
Han Kang
