Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
By David Hoon Kim
Between a book’s cover, title, and dust jacket, a lot can be done to convince a reader to pick it up off the shelf. At some point between first glance and the act of reading, you might convince yourself of the qualities or plot. It’s possible to convince yourself that you already know what the experience of reading the book is going to be, and how you’re going to feel about it.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost has a surreal Eiphel tower on the cover, that looks as if it’s more drug-fueled mirage than actual sight. The dust jacket pitch would have me believe that David Hoon Kim’s debut novel is about a translation student whose girlfriend spends a month inside of her dorm room before emerging dead. Herself, or her doppelgängers, are then found all over Paris and through his life. I was imagining a mind-bending ghost story that dealt with personhood and gave equal page time to both male and female protagonists. Maybe it’s my fault that I was expecting the book to be more of a party, or that there would be a literal ghost. What isn’t my fault, were the chapters that felt like they had nothing to do with the original story, or characters that disappeared after they served the purpose of being interesting in front of main character Henrik.
David Hoon Kim wrote sequences that had me twisting through concepts and ideas that could have worked really well. Kim could have written about Henrik’s relationship with the star translation student and his eventual spiral into celebrity madness. Kim could have stuck to writing about the medical student, dissecting in the name of finishing the work of a former doctor she idolized. Even Henrik’s time spent in translation school could have served as a strong story with all the imagery he wrote through the rest of the book. Unfortunately the time jumps and lack of connective tissue between stories led to a confusing read. For much of it, I was unsure who the narrator was, whether the women being described were supposed to be Fumiko’s doppelgängers, or at times what genre book I was supposed to be reading. It’s as if Kim took a series of really good writings and threw them into a blender to somehow communicate a more literary choice than those that the individual stories held.
What Kim does well, he does really well. There’s an entire chapter about Korean tour guides showing Korean tourists around Paris, during which they discover something that should not exist and it begins to unravel the community of Korean Parisians that have found their community. It comes from nowhere and contains characters that haven’t been introduced until that chapter, all of whom I wanted to know much more of. The pacing is great and there are several strong hooks that kept me interested to the end of the section, even though it had nothing to do with any of the book before or after it. I could be wrong about how out of place it actually was, but that’s the sense I had throughout the novel. A general feeling of confusion, that nothing made sense or fit with any of the other information I had up to that point possessed. It’s an accomplishment to write so well that faults a reader might see in a novel can be described as artistic intent. I may not have enjoyed every moment of it, but I have to admit it was good.