Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

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.

David Hoon Kim’s debut is a transgressive, darkly comic novel of becoming lost and found in translation. With each successive, 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.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost wasn’t like anything I’d read before: an adventure among languages, but also Paris, about the ways languages control us-the ones we grew up with, the ones we learn as adults, the ones we never learn but might have-and how they set boundaries we almost never see, on our lives, our desires, our sense of possibility, even our ghosts, except in glimpses. I left haunted in ways I hadn’t thought possible." - Alexander Chee

"The kind of book that holds you in a dream as you read it, intricate and frictionless and always marvelous. David Hoon Kim in his deep understanding of the strangeness of human experience and the connective bands between past, present, and future, belongs in the same company as writers like Emily St. John Mandel and Lauren Groff." - Kelly Link

"In Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost, the characters pursue one another through morgues, cemeteries, and catacombs. And yet the book is replete with the wonders of life, explored by a narrator who catalogues the scents and tastes and voices of Paris in exquisite detail. David Hoon Kim has created a novel so rich with synchronicity and mystery that when you set it down and rejoin the world, the familiar landmarks of your daily life seem filled with hidden possibilities." - Anjali Sachdeva

"An elegant book, shot through with eeriness and intelligence. A genuinely spooky, strange, and compulsive read, like walking through a cemetery and reading the tombstones while the eyes of crows watch your back." - Namwali Serpell