Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim
Review of Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim
Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim (2021). Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This is yet another one of my random library finds. One of my favorite things to do is just wander into my library with little to no expectations about what I’m going to find, then finding out that there’s so many good things that I’ve just never heard of before. It’s absolutely wild to me. This was in the very front of the new fiction section, and I was specifically intrigued by the title. The clashing juxtaposition of a ghost and a party seemed completely and utterly intriguing to me at the time, and while the writer was educated at the Iowa Writers Workshop for their MFA, they are a Korean-born American educated in France. And upon inspecting the book blurb on the jacket, this was the story that we were similarly going to follow in the novel; our main character is an adopted Japanese guy (he was adopted by Danish parents) who is now living and studying in Paris, France.
I am going to say upfront before we jump into the main part of this review is that it came across as a strange fever dream to me. I honestly did not like our main character—more on why later—and felt that the first person narrative inside his head made me not like the novel even more. I can see some of myself in him, but, at the same time, I couldn’t relate to him as a person or as a creative and that frustrated me a lot. There are some really fascinating moments in this book about people caught in-between, like Fumiko, that we’re going to discuss later in this review.
I’ve said quite a bit already so let’s dive into this review!
Content
Our main character in this book is Henrik, an ethnic Asian (who is specifically Japanese) that was adopted by Danish parents and is now living in France to live out his dream of being an English to French and vice versa translator for literature. Which is ironic, considering French isn’t his first language and he fakes having a British lilt to his French in order to get a physics translation gig for two hundred Euros. We often get little scenes of Henrik constantly being othered by the people around him; the French mockingly say konnichiwa to him, although he doesn’t really speak any Japanese what-so-ever. Asian people in Japan have a tendency to walk up to him, thinking he speaks their language, when in actuality he doesn’t. He just looks Asian but is culturally Danish.
His world begins to change when he starts dating Fumiko, a Japanese girl studying in France. She, too, was shocked to find out he was adopted and knows nothing about his Japanese heritage. There’s a bunch of cultural misunderstandings between the two of them because she actually doesn’t understand and speak French properly, and, like many other relationships that span borders and cultures, there’s misunderstandings. But that doesn’t really matter because at the very beginning of the novel she commits suicide. Which leads me to my complaints about Henrik.
This guy knows his girlfriend has retreated to her room for thirty days, and outside of knocking at the door and being like “hey, you okay?” and getting no response, he has done nothing. He wonders if she’s had enough food in there to survive, when he literally mentions she has like an apple and a can of chickpeas. This is no cause of concern? Why didn’t he call the cops or bust the door down? It doesn’t matter if she’s going to hate him for it, but, at the end of the day, he could’ve saved her life. We then get these casual scenes in the second part of the novel in which we literally are having him and other students dissect her dead body, which is also pretty messed up if you ask me. I got French New Wave vibes once we hit this part of the book, since it starts to deviate from a more traditional novel into something that comes across more as experimental.
Henrik also has his entire story revolve around Fumiko’s death, to the point where the sections of the novel are titled “before Fumiko” and “after Fumiko,” but then he has this tendency to lapse into strange philosophical monologues as he wanders the streets of Paris, others fellow Asians, and then discusses about he doesn’t feel like he fits in to society. Which are valid things to dwell upon, but I would’ve preferred to be shown this more than have Henrik mull about it over and over again. But then we forget about Fumiko and the people watching tends to overtake the entire book and then he starts to mull over about people and their relationships. This is where I started getting frustrated with this man.
Another key problem is that the three sections themselves don’t feel connected at all. They feel like completely different stories meshed into one, which is okay but also not. The big deciding event happens at the end of the first section, so it feels kind of pointless to keep reading if Fumiko is kind of left in the dust and the narrator goes on a tangent for the remainder of the novel. It really was a struggle to keep reading to be honest.
Overall Thoughts
I’d say only read this one if you sound really intrigued by the premise and want to give it a shot. I personally fell into that camp, gave it a shot, but didn’t end up liking it. Perhaps I’m just the wrong audience for a book like this, or that I’m not the kind of fan that David Hoon Kim is looking for in this kind of novel. It’s an interesting premise but the execution kind of fell flat at the end of the day, which I’m not into. So read at your own risk. The writing itself is actually pretty good, it’s just that the narrator comes off as extremely pretentious and slightly obsessed.
