The narrator travels through a cityscape that bears visible traces of World War II: “The boundaries that separate old from new, the seams bearing witness to destruction, lie conspicuously exposed. It was on that day, as I walked through the park, that she first came into my mind.” That “she” is the narrator’s older sister, who died “less than two hours into life.” “They lay there on the kitchen floor, my mother on her side with the dead baby clutched to her chest, feeling the cold gradually enter into the flesh, sinking through to the bone.” The confluence of the resurrected city and the lost sister becomes the through-line for a novel told in flashes and fragments, as an act of memory and incantation.

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Smith’s rendering of “The White Book” cannot be accused of prolixity. The novel is composed of short entries centered on a word or phrase having to do with the color white, opening with a list that includes “salt,” “shroud” and “blank paper.” From this, the narrator constructs the novel: “Now, in this moment, I feel that vertiginous thrill course through me. As I step recklessly into time I have not yet lived, into this book I have not yet written.”

What follows is a text shot through with “vertiginous thrill.” The dead sister haunts the narrator: “For there are moments, lying in the darkened room, when the chill in the air is a palpable presence. Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die. … Perhaps I, too, have opened my eyes in the darkness, as she did, and gazed out.”

The novel moves fluidly between the “I” and the “she,” in shifts between first and third person, but also in the slow collapse of the boundary between the narrator and the sister, the living and the dead. This culminates in the forging of an alternate history of the sister’s birth: “And yet, before dawn, when the first milk finally came from her mother’s breasts and she pressed her nipple between the tiny lips, she found that, despite everything, the baby was still breathing. Though she had, by now, slipped from consciousness, the nipple in her mouth encouraged a soft swallowing, gradually growing stronger.”

Resurrection is a theme throughout Han’s work, one that is tied up in political and collective memory. In “Human Acts,” a writer observes an illegal police raid on a group of activists. In it, she sees the specter of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a sustained protest against South Korea’s military government that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths: “I remember being glued to the television … and surprising myself with the words that sprang from my mouth: But that’s Gwangju. … The radioactive spread is ongoing. Gwangju had been reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up anew in a bloodied rebirth.”