Han Kang

Shortlisted for the Man Booker International 2018 From the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2016 From the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts comes a book like no other. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. It is a book about mourning, rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit. It is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life. Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.

The White Book

Malou Vandeput

In the distance, the surface of the water bulges upward. The winter sea mounts its approach, surging closer in. The wave reaches its greatest possible height and shatters in a spray of white. The shattered water slides back over the sandy shore.

Standing at this border where land and water meet,watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity

Each wave becomes dazzlingly white at the momentof its shattering. Farther out, the tranquil body of water flashes like the scales of innumerable fish. The glittering of multitudes is there. The shifting, stirring, tossing of multitudes. Nothing is eternal

nico

if she believes that she has never been shattered. she believe that she will be shattered no more

rain/anagha

Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity.

Everything passes. She bears this remembrance—the knowledge that everything she has clung to will fall away from her and vanish—

Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of.

 sleep has been scattered and shallow. Even if she did drop off for a while, she would rise to find the world just as dark as before. 

in the clarity of their stillness, in their

If silence could be condensed into the smallest, most solid object, this is how it would feel

The White Book quotes

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