The White Book

New inventions require new terms. 电脑 (diànnăo in Mandarin), literally electric brain, is the Chinese term for a computer. The Danes tried out datamat, arbejdsstation and edb-maskine before giving up and just copying the English. The Koreans, with 컴퓨터 (keompyuteo), and Japanese, with コンピュータ (konpyūta), did the same. Icelanders went with a bunch of different terms, including loaning computer, before settling on Sigurður Nordal’s suggestion tölva.

This is representative of Icelandic attempts to maintain an inner consistency to their language. To a much lesser extent than most other European languages, Icelandic has seen little change since the initial settlement of Iceland by the Norse over a thousand years ago. Yes, the Runic alphabet was abandoned in favour of a Latin-based one, words have been added and faded away from the lexicon, and pronunciations have drifted. Yet when compared to Iceland’s Norse cousins on the European mainland, namely Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the drift has been minuscule. The Scandinavians loaned words from their Hanseatic trading partners and, due to Napoleon’s forays, even from the French. And though Old English may be mutually intelligible to Icelanders even today, the English, with their mongrel language, stand a snowball’s chance in hell in understanding the tongue of those who roamed Old Blighty a millennium ago.

The unfortunate term for this phenomenon is linguistic purity. Foreignness immediately implies impurity, a tarnishing of what’s right, a sullying. I could have sworn that I once watched a BBC documentary where some Icelandic scholars were searching for an alternative term to ‘pure’ in order to discourage unsavoury tourists (read: white supremacists) from visiting to enjoy an ‘unsullied’ culture. Alas, my bookmarks and Google-fu are failing me.

‘White’, for me, evokes many similar feelings of discomfort. I still double take whenever I read ‘The Whites’, a nickname for Leeds United (after the colour of their Real Madrid inspired home kit), not a Mosley appreciation group. Whities, too, which has thankfully since been renamed to AD 93, used to cause me to squirm – a fantastic music label originally named after the interplay of ‘YT’ (as the label originated as a Young Turks sub-label, which itself has since been renamed to Young) with ‘white’ labels (which are records without accompanying artwork, typically test presses, promos or bootlegs).

The White Book by Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, translated by Deborah Smith, is suffused with whiteness. Snowflakes, blank pages, too delicate flowers emerge from Kang’s prose turned poetry. The sensitivity and preciseness and artfulness are a wonder to behold. Only first half-way through, when an etymological discussion arises on ‘blank’ vs ‘blanc’, can the text be accused of being bland.

However, an uncomfortable emptiness pervades The White Book. At first, it is almost imperceptible, a slither missing. Yet as the words flow past, a chasm emerges, where the words avoid mention. The chasm of grief. For here, whiteness, above all, denotes not purity nor new beginnings, but the desolation of a life lived around the contours of a life unlived. No words could describe the sadness. Yet in The White Book, Han Kang finds them.