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auburngatesTW for mentions of: miscarriages and child death
I don't have the best memory, so I haven't got the faintest clue how I ended up buying this book, but to say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. I was utterly amazed.
I'd read the synopsis, of course, but it was, in my honest opinion, far too vague to prepare me for the level at which this was about to affect me.
The synopsis had read as follows:
"The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a simple 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."
And I don't think it does it justice; I don't think it describes it well enough. Yes, it is about mourning, but it's a specific kind of it—the mourning of the non-existent, a life not lived, but could have been. And that is a completely different kind of mourning to me. But perhaps I am being too harsh—a side effect of the amount of damage this book had done to me. But it it also comes from a place of understanding for Han's sentiments; because I know, all too well, what it is like to mourn a life that was not lived but could have been, and the guilt that comes from the thought, the reminder that they'd died for you to live.
Page 139, a chapter titled Your eyes. There's this line on the third paragraph that I keep coming back to.
If only you hadn't stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead. I who would then never have been born.
There is something about this that keeps pulling me in, and I know it's simply because of how much I understand it, how much I relate to it, but maybe it's also because I'd finally read something that had summed up what I'd been thinking all my life. I'd never taken the time to actually find the words to say it, to explain it, and I'd always felt kind of guilty about that, because I'd grown up putting everything I've ever felt into words, and so to leave it out was inevitably almost a crime to myself. But I've realized that there was never any need for that in the first place, because when I'd read this, I knew, for a fact, that there was no need for that. Han Kang had already done it for me.
But now as I think about it even more, it isn't just the sheer vagueness of the synopsis that makes me dislike it. It's also how it just glosses over what it really is about.
Mourning and rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit, yes. But what The White Book is really about is how Han mourns a miscarriage that had caused her mother to lose her older sister, the guilt she has to face knowing that that miscarriage had led to her life; it's Han giving her life to her older sister by envisioning her in her place through beautifully written paragraphs about her everyday life.
But above all else, personal and emotional impact aside, what had tied my 5-star rating for this was how Han utilizes language wonderfully, no word wasted as she describes both the mundane and insane in paragraphs upon paragraphs of beautiful prose. (And I've also got Deborah Smith to thank, for the absolutely godlike translation.) Han is, without a doubt, a master at her craft, never once failing at utilizing all her words to take us to places, put us in shoes that aren't our own.
---
Some of my favorite lines:
"At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived, and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable."
"And so I can neither confirm nor deny that there are times when she has sought me out, hovering at my forehead or by the corners of my eyes. That some vague sensation I had known as a child, some stirring of seemingly unprompted emotion, might, unbeknown to me, have been coming from her. For there are moments, lying in the darkened room, when the chill in the air is a palpable presence."
(context: page 33, chapter "The direction of the light"
The chapter talks about a man who had claimed to live for as long as he could remember with his older brother's soul, who had died at six in the Jewish ghetto. He'd claimed to have heard the child's voice from time to time, screaming the same handful of terror-struck words, choked out when the soldiers had come to arrest him.)
"And I think of her coming here instead of me.
To this curiously familiar city, whose death and life resemble her own."
"There are certain memories which remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin."
I don't have the best memory, so I haven't got the faintest clue how I ended up buying this book, but to say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. I was utterly amazed.
I'd read the synopsis, of course, but it was, in my honest opinion, far too vague to prepare me for the level at which this was about to affect me.
The synopsis had read as follows:
"The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a simple 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."
And I don't think it does it justice; I don't think it describes it well enough. Yes, it is about mourning, but it's a specific kind of it—the mourning of the non-existent, a life not lived, but could have been. And that is a completely different kind of mourning to me. But perhaps I am being too harsh—a side effect of the amount of damage this book had done to me. But it it also comes from a place of understanding for Han's sentiments; because I know, all too well, what it is like to mourn a life that was not lived but could have been, and the guilt that comes from the thought, the reminder that they'd died for you to live.
Page 139, a chapter titled Your eyes. There's this line on the third paragraph that I keep coming back to.
If only you hadn't stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead. I who would then never have been born.
There is something about this that keeps pulling me in, and I know it's simply because of how much I understand it, how much I relate to it, but maybe it's also because I'd finally read something that had summed up what I'd been thinking all my life. I'd never taken the time to actually find the words to say it, to explain it, and I'd always felt kind of guilty about that, because I'd grown up putting everything I've ever felt into words, and so to leave it out was inevitably almost a crime to myself. But I've realized that there was never any need for that in the first place, because when I'd read this, I knew, for a fact, that there was no need for that. Han Kang had already done it for me.
But now as I think about it even more, it isn't just the sheer vagueness of the synopsis that makes me dislike it. It's also how it just glosses over what it really is about.
Mourning and rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit, yes. But what The White Book is really about is how Han mourns a miscarriage that had caused her mother to lose her older sister, the guilt she has to face knowing that that miscarriage had led to her life; it's Han giving her life to her older sister by envisioning her in her place through beautifully written paragraphs about her everyday life.
But above all else, personal and emotional impact aside, what had tied my 5-star rating for this was how Han utilizes language wonderfully, no word wasted as she describes both the mundane and insane in paragraphs upon paragraphs of beautiful prose. (And I've also got Deborah Smith to thank, for the absolutely godlike translation.) Han is, without a doubt, a master at her craft, never once failing at utilizing all her words to take us to places, put us in shoes that aren't our own.
---
Some of my favorite lines:
"At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived, and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable."
"And so I can neither confirm nor deny that there are times when she has sought me out, hovering at my forehead or by the corners of my eyes. That some vague sensation I had known as a child, some stirring of seemingly unprompted emotion, might, unbeknown to me, have been coming from her. For there are moments, lying in the darkened room, when the chill in the air is a palpable presence."
(context: page 33, chapter "The direction of the light"
The chapter talks about a man who had claimed to live for as long as he could remember with his older brother's soul, who had died at six in the Jewish ghetto. He'd claimed to have heard the child's voice from time to time, screaming the same handful of terror-struck words, choked out when the soldiers had come to arrest him.)
"And I think of her coming here instead of me.
To this curiously familiar city, whose death and life resemble her own."
"There are certain memories which remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin."
