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A review by paperrcuts
The White Book by Han Kang

4.0

"Why do old memories constantly drift to the surface here in this unfamiliar city? When I go out into the streets, the scraps of conversation that pull into focus when the speaker brushes past me, the words stamped on street and shop signs, are almost all incomprehensible. 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. The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior."