Try Prime Hello, Sign in Account & Lists Sign in Account & Lists Returns & Orders Try Prime Cart. The author of The Vegetarian has written a powerful autobiographical meditation on the life and death of a newborn sister, Thu 2 Nov 2017 03.30 EDT I often hear a song and I’m taken back to a time, to a place, to a person, to an experience that I never will be able to regain: to a moment that song embodies that will forever be lost in the endless river of life. Much annotated and very much loved. What follows feels like essay, like Knausgaard with his lists of topics in his seasonal books, but with a definite female perspective. The translation reads seamlessly, and the whole effect is beautiful and haunting. Descriptions of the feelings these things invoke, politics, reminders of the past, present. 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. The White Book by Han Kang Paperback CDN$ 15.42. The White Book by Han Kang review – the fragility of life. Here are my thoughts on another one of the longlisted Man Booker International Prize books! Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 . She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. This book is a series of very short chapters consisting of meditation-like bursts of thoughts. ... Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. Han wisely gives as much value to those heightened two hours of life as she does to her death. The author of The Vegetarian has written a powerful autobiographical meditation on the life and death of a newborn sister. 8,49 € Deine kalten Hände: Roman Han Kang. Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins. Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. She is also the author of Human Acts (Portobello, 2016) and The White Book (Portobello, 2017). London: Portobello Books, 2017. The narrator of this book doesn’t have a name in the book, although it’s no secret that this is an autobiographical work by this author and is a love letter to her long deceased older sister. Each section is composed of a motif, an aspect related to the event that is lyrically and masterfully crafted with poetic language and rich vocabulary. Very emotional set of words which mainly covers the death of her elder sister after only two hours of life. Hogarth. Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. I knew that I was engaging with the most sophisticated kind of writing intelligence. Throughout the years, the author has often thought of her sister and the grief that has never ended for her family. Now shortlisted for the Man Booker International - and alongside Flights, one of the two outstanding remaining books: This comes across as a series of meditations on things that are white, written as vignettes in probing and poignant language you could call prose poetry. We get little nuggets suggesting hard life during the Korean War and sources of grief like her mother’s loss of a prematurely born sibling. Her characteristically poetic writing, driven by the visual ornaments of the colour white, is most potent in short fragments. The White Book is a novel that's difficult to describe, but easy to love. The narrator of this book doesn’t have a name in the book, although it’s no secret that this is an autobiographical work by this author and is a love letter to her long deceased older sister. Like “Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. Han Kang has won the Man Booker International Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature. ‘The Vegetarian’.....was fierce with haunting prose making it very hard to put down. When, in the novel, she walks around a building that was once destroyed in a 1944 air raid and then rebuilt, she observes how it has been faithfully reconstructed, incorporating into its new structure an old pillar that had survived. “I adored Han Kang’s eerie English-language debut of denial, excess, and transformation, The Vegetarian, and I can’t wait to read her next tale, which promises to be equal parts Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and something entirely Han Kang’s own. In other words, rather than May 1980 suddenly springing into being, I wanted to show how the military government’s oppression of human rights in the 1970s, and the labour movement, became the kindling. It re-imagines that baby's life in tandem with the narrator's own life who came into existence only because her older sibling did not survive. This is an examination of the color white, paralleled with the story of a woman who loses her baby hours after it is born. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who … By Sana Mohsin. I found, fans of Kang and poetry or flash fiction fans. When I first read Han Kang’s modernist masterpiece, The Vegetarian, its accumulative effect was shattering. Mysterious hexagons melting clean away.”. February 19th 2019 Summary; Book Summary. And while I could certainly 'appreciate' what she does here, I must say the results left me rather ... cold and indifferent; even though the sad event that occasions her musings here are something I can relate to, having had a stillborn older sibling myself. Han Kang’s The White Book is a meditation on grief using a study of white objects in the author’s life to spark memories of events she did—and did not—experience, specifically the birth and deaths of her older sister (and a quickly mentioned older brother, who also succumbed to premature birth) and their mother. 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