A Review of David Hoon Kim’s Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost (FSG, 2021)
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trihal
About 40 pages in to this novel, I thought to myself: wow, this prose is just exquisite. I paused to look at the back cover and noted that one of my favorite writers, Alexander Chee, had blurbed it! I should have known I was in great hands once this novel got Chee’s seal of approval, and I’m here to tell you: David Hoon Kim’s Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost (FSG, 2021) is an absolutely intriguing, whimsically meandering journey. Let’s let the official marketing description provide us with some more tidbits: “In a strangely distorted 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 Blatand, 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 medical students. 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.” While the novel is certainly structured around the loss of Fumiko, I think it’s best read through the lens of Henrik’s desire to connect with anyone he meets beyond a superficial level. There is a consistent sense that he’s seeking out something more meaningful, whether it is with friends or with possible romantic partners. The prose is always the standout: even as the novel meanders, twists and turns, you’re always buoyed up by Kim’s vivid sense of description, of affectual perception, of Henrik’s always dynamic insights of what he sees and feels. There is a very interesting shift in the narrative perspective early on in the novel that I still haven’t quite figured out, but even then, Kim’s signature prose style is apparent. The sure-footedness of the narrative voice is the standout of this work, which vividly gives us a sense of the Henrik’s struggle to find his place in Paris. The occasional frustration is that the narrative will occasionally turn away so abruptly from a given encounter than Henrik might having with another character, that your sometimes left a little breathless and wanting more. Yet, that kind of feeling is of course part and parcel of the longing that we feel always bubbling up under the surface of Henrik, who continually seeks the transcend the desultory everyday in the potentialities that exist when he leaps out across the great divide to connect with someone else.
Buy the Book Here
https://us.macmillan.com/books/978037...
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trihal
About 40 pages in to this novel, I thought to myself: wow, this prose is just exquisite. I paused to look at the back cover and noted that one of my favorite writers, Alexander Chee, had blurbed it! I should have known I was in great hands once this novel got Chee’s seal of approval, and I’m here to tell you: David Hoon Kim’s Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost (FSG, 2021) is an absolutely intriguing, whimsically meandering journey. Let’s let the official marketing description provide us with some more tidbits: “In a strangely distorted 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 Blatand, 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 medical students. 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.” While the novel is certainly structured around the loss of Fumiko, I think it’s best read through the lens of Henrik’s desire to connect with anyone he meets beyond a superficial level. There is a consistent sense that he’s seeking out something more meaningful, whether it is with friends or with possible romantic partners. The prose is always the standout: even as the novel meanders, twists and turns, you’re always buoyed up by Kim’s vivid sense of description, of affectual perception, of Henrik’s always dynamic insights of what he sees and feels. There is a very interesting shift in the narrative perspective early on in the novel that I still haven’t quite figured out, but even then, Kim’s signature prose style is apparent. The sure-footedness of the narrative voice is the standout of this work, which vividly gives us a sense of the Henrik’s struggle to find his place in Paris. The occasional frustration is that the narrative will occasionally turn away so abruptly from a given encounter than Henrik might having with another character, that your sometimes left a little breathless and wanting more. Yet, that kind of feeling is of course part and parcel of the longing that we feel always bubbling up under the surface of Henrik, who continually seeks the transcend the desultory everyday in the potentialities that exist when he leaps out across the great divide to connect with someone else.
Buy the Book Here
https://us.macmillan.com/books/978037...
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