Book Recommendations: The White Book by Han Kang, and Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Illustrated by Ella Clayton.

I first came across The White Book by Han Kang completely by chance. I’d read The Vegetarian by the same author, so Kang’s writing had already left its mark on me, but I happened to stumble across The White Book. Having missed my train, the logical thing to do to pass time was spontaneous book browsing. I picked up the book from a train station Waterstones, and I’m very glad that I did. 

The White Book is written as a series of prose poems, interspersed with minimalist grayscale photographs. It opens with a simple list of white things demanding to be written about. Each white thing gets its own small section, from a few pages to a few lines. The reader is led on a sensual journey through disparate fragments of a woman’s life, arranged through an array of white things. Kang uses the colour white to explore long standing grief and loneliness, as she illustrates how the tragedy of her sister’s death has haunted her and her family, and how the colour white both embodies and sinks into her emotions and her life in all its fragmented pieces. It’s definitely an immersive experience,as if you feel the world fading to white around you as you’re reading. 

The language is utterly breath-taking, but avoids purple prose – it’s almost numbed, yet equally frank and striking. She uses her unique tone combined with the book’s innovative formatting to create a deeply emotive reading journey which captures each grainy complexity of the colour white, while somehow colouring it with emotion. Han Kang has a beautiful way with words that creeps into your soul. The White Book was emotive; it affects your emotions so subtly you almost don’t realise it’s doing so until you’ve finished reading. 

The way she explores human emotion and experiences through colour was fascinating to read and left me wanting more. This led me to Anne Carson’s delightful Autobiography of Red as another exploration of humanity and life through colour. 

Carson rewrites Stesichorus’ lost poem, Tale of Geryon, into a modern world, rewriting Geryon’s autobiography through a beautifully written hybrid of poetry and prose. The classic tale of Geryon’s murder by Herakles for his tenth labour is spun into a modern tale of a red-winged monster, sexually abused by his brother, who finds solace in a faintly toxic romantic relationship with Herakles, photography, and the writing of his autobiography. The tale is deeply moving, but in a different way to the white book. Both are explorations of the life and emotions of one individual through colour, but the narrative of Carson’s book is less fragmentary in comparison to Kang. There is a distinct sense of characters and individuality in a way the white book doesn’t have, simply because it follows a consistent narrative. 

That both texts are able to have such incredible emotional impact through exploring a colour was utterly fascinating to me. Colour is always a huge part of our lives, in art, in music, how we express ourselves – it’s a fundamental part of how we see the world. Using one particular colour to pull on emotions had never occurred to me before, and it seems like something that might not be able to hold one's interest for a full book. Yet, needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Reading these two books has changed the way I interpret things around me, both the people and the landscape. Not drastically, I don’t think either was life changing, but everything has a little more colour in it, perhaps a little more art. I’m hoping to pick up Maggie Nelson’s Bluets as my next foray into this tiny sub-genre of colour literature. I’m honestly in awe of what I’ve read from it so far.