Shortlisted for the Man Booker International 2018. A stunning meditation on the colour white; about light, about death and about ritual
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at
the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University.
Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young
Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The
Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was
published by Portobello Books in 2015 and won the 2016 Man Booker
International Prize. She is also the author of Human Acts
(Portobello, 2016) and The White Book (Portobello, 2017). She is
based in Seoul.
Deborah Smith's translations from the Korean include two novels by
Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts, and two by Bae Suah, A
Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Deborah completed a PhD at
SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis
Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary
Translation. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.
A brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between
place, history and memory... Poised and never flinches from serene
dignity... The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a
secular prayer book... Translated seamlessly by Smith, The White
Book succeeds in reflecting Han's urgent desire to transcend pain
with language
*Guardian*
Wonderful. A quietly gripping contemplation on life, death and the
existential impact of those who have gone before
*Eimear McBride*
The White Book is a profound and precious thing, its language
achingly intimate, each image haunting and true. It is a remarkable
achievement. Han Kang is a genius
*Lisa McInerney*
There is beauty and pain in every sentence and image, made sharper
by their simplicity and aching honesty
*New Internationalist*
Each [chapter] is a miniature work of art in its own right... there
is a crispness to [Han's] pieces evocative of the stark
luminescence of white... This is a book you want to underline and
highlight every other line or word as you read, yet every time I
went to make my mark, my pencil hovered over the margins - deep as
drifts of pillow-white snow - as I remained reticent to taint the
perfect whiteness in front of me. The White Book is a shimmering,
evocative work. Smith's peerless translation captures every last
tiny nuance, the resultant prose so beautiful and affecting that it
stops you in your tracks
*National UAE*
A fragile work of literature
*Live Mint*
Delicate and thoughtful and concise and dense and strong; this is
the kind of writing I like to read slowly
*Guardian*
An astonishingly rendered work of fiction... Precise, subversive,
fierce and deceptively opaque... A sublime expression of grief's
incongruous byways, its busy inactivity, its larger, more elaborate
intrusions
*Financial Times*
[Han] in her new work transgresses literary convention and examines
the constellation of pain at the heart of her mother's first
pregnancy... Shot through with pain and paradox [...] Kang
transforms obliteration into promise. Loss and living are
counterpointed, neither meaning revoked
*Arts Desk*
[An] astonishing novel... with such tenderness [that] incites us to
examine our own experience and place in the world... It's a
profound piece of work [...] that is as much concerned with what is
unsaid and omitted, as what is revealed... Han's painful, exquisite
story is a philosophical lament for all the shades of life
*Irish Times*
Incantatory... The White Book reveals Han to be an innovative
author committed to formal experimentation... Intensely personal,
hypnotically serene, and mournfully meditative, Han's thanatopsis
reminds readers of the revivifying power of memory and the extent
to which we are uniquely endowed within the natural world to
withstand the vagaries of forgetfulness and life's nagging
ephemerality
*Asian Review of Books*
An intensely emotional series of accounts that form an outline of
losses which are invisible, but still palpably felt
*Lonesome Reader*
Evocative and beautifully laconic, this book is about belonging,
grief and the sensory experience of being alive
*Book Riot*
A brilliant psychogeography
*Deborah Levy*
A tender evocation of grief and absence... Han Kang is a real
artist
*Irish Times*
Formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political
*International New York Times*
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