The White Book

 
　　韓江迄今為止最自傳和最實驗的書。是對色彩的冥想、對人類精神的堅韌和脆弱，以及我們試圖從毀滅的灰燼中嫁接新生命的企圖。
 
　　作為一名作家在華沙居住的作品，這座城市因過去的暴力而顯得傷痕累累，敘述者發現自己被她的姐姐在出生後僅僅兩個小時就死了這事困擾， 爾後他便對白色事物產生了探索。敘述者以強烈的詩意昇華展開自己試圖重建故事的生命空白頁面 。
 

　　From the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian
 
　　Both the most autobiographical and the most experimental book to date from South Korean master Han Kang. Written while on a writer’s 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 - unfold in a powerfully poetic distillation. As she walks the unfamiliar, snow-streaked streets, lined by buildings formerly obliterated in the Second World War, their identities blur and overlap as the narrator wonders, ’Can I give this life to you?’. The White Book is a book like no other. It is a meditation on a colour, on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

作者簡介

　　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, won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Human Acts, her second novel published in English (Portobello Books, 2016), won the Manhae Literary Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. 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.