The White Book

Recommended by Alina Varlanuta, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #14 in Korean

From the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian

Writing while on a residency in Warsaw, a city palpably scarred by the violence of the past, the narrator finds herself haunted by the story of her older sister, who died a mere two hours after birth. A fragmented exploration of white things - the swaddling bands that were also her shroud, the breast milk she did not live to drink, the blank page on which the narrator herself attempts to reconstruct the story - unfolds in a powerfully poetic distillation.

As she walks the unfamiliar,...
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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The White Book from the world's leading experts.

Alina Varlanuta I recently read it and it still flickers on my mind. It is an autobiographical writing reflecting on the narrator’s baby sister who died two hours after her birth. It is fragmented into different perspectives. Each opens a white dimension where mourning, frailty and death are dissolving word by word, in utter silence. I loved the structure as the author makes at the beginning a list of the white things that are connected to the narrative. I read it as a book of and on silence, the silence you feel in front of the big words like death and life. The big, yet fragile words. One of my favorite... (Source)


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