When Fumiko emerges after one month of being locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving behind a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these
remnants are 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 who wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom
Henrik finds sitting in his seat 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 about 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.
