Name: Sara Mercedes's review of Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim
Item: Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
Rating: 3
Author: Sara Mercedes

David Hoon Kim

In a disorienting and seamy Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelgänger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of young medical students, including “you.” Henrik’s inquiry expands beyond Fumiko’s seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend’s precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself. David Hoon Kim’s debut is a transgressive, darkly comic novel of becoming lost and found in translation. With each disarming, echoic chapter, Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost plunges us more deeply beneath the surface of things, to the displacement, exile, grief, and desire that hide in plain sight.

A Novel

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

Sara Mercedes

Drue Thomas

With a protagonist who struggles to maintain connections, the structure of the story itself feels disconnected. We traverse years of his life, and the audience learns quickly not to become attached to any of the secondary characters because they won't last. Everyone is transient because the main character himself is too. Henrik at turns takes chances on all kinds of people, and cuts himself out of their stories abruptly. The story explores loneliness, searching for meaning or love or something none of us can quite understand, and the meaning that gets lost in translation between two people, no matter what language they are speaking. 

Drue Thomas &
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim

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Drue Thomas &Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim

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Drue Thomas &
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim