I really enjoyed this book! It was a really interesting glimpse into the life of an adoptee in Japan followed by the ghost of a woman he once loved. The story follows Fumiko and Henrik, who meet after Fumiko's death but are unaware that this is actually her ghost.

The story does an amazing job of showing how much people can be affected by their pasts and how they can haunt them even after death. Even though the characters are fictional, I felt like I knew them well from living in France for so long.

I thought that David Hoon Kim did an amazing job with this book by creating such vivid characters that I felt like I could easily picture them standing right next to me in real life. It's hard to describe what makes his writing so unique—it just feels different somehow—but it definitely works!

I felt like a ghost reading this. This book is a series of novellas that follows a very faint timeline in the main character, Henrik’s life. It’s filled with many hopeful chance encounters with people who fade away into nothing. It was written in a very meandering way that felt rewarding at some points and tedious at others. I stopped and started a lot while reading, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because I think part of the book’s charm was the abrupt cut-offs that grounded each novella in reality. (Also the dark/dry humor that pervades the book) Overall, I thought Henrik’s was a unique perspective and I felt empathy for his character. One thing I was slightly put off by were the very niche references that made some sections feel overwrought.

Unfortunately, this review copy wasn't available as a .mobi and had a limited time span regarding its accessibility when reading it via the Nergalley App.

I reviewed Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost for CRB. The review can be found here: https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/david-hoon-kim-paris-is-a-party-paris-is-a-ghost-review

Three losely connected time periods make up this strange little novel. Three losely connected time periods that felt distinct, but not terribly purposeful. Kim's writing style feels solid, but I didn't feel like this one held a lot of meat for me. There were moments I caught a glimpse of something more, but Kim didn't quite follow through.

Was I disappointed? Yes. Would I still read another by Kim? Yes.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This novel is divided into three sections; Fumiko, Before Fumiko and After Fumiko so from the start the timeline is displaced. It’s mostly written from the point of view of Henrik, a Danish language student studying in Paris. He was adopted as a baby and is of Japanese heritage. Fumiko was his girlfriend in Paris, she was sent by her family to study after a breakdown in Japan. Displacement and difference, in appearance, language or culture seem to be the major themes but there was much more. The opening section is the most compelling , I was completely fascinated by the story of the blind man that Henrik works for. But the last bits about Henrik and his goddaughter also has great imagery. Much of the novel reads like interconnected short stories and I enjoyed the dreamlike qualities of the writing. A strange and in some ways disturbing book, that I found very readable.

Any book that uses Paris as a starting point intrigues me. I was really into this book - while it took me a minute to get pulled in it ended up being very worth it. Dark comedy moments at its finest & resoundingly eerie.

I was really looking forward to this book by the description of it. It sounded mysterious and dark, which it absolutely was. Unfortunately, I found it slightly difficult to follow at times, though I will be totally honest and say that that probably has more to do with me and how my brain works than the writing itself.

It is a beautifully written book that I have no doubt many people will absolutely adore and love, and I will still be recommending it to book lovers I know!

“𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬,” 𝐈 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐫, 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐲, 𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬, “𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐭.”

This is a peculiar novel, and it truly is like a dream, where you wake up with feelings, an uncomfortable foreboding that something bad is coming and yet unable to prevent it. It’s all over the place, dizzying, confusing, and yet you’re hooked, bombarded by distorted views, thoughts. There doesn’t seem to be an anchor, except Henrik’s guilt in the aftermath of his girlfriend Fumiko’s death. A student at Paris University, Henrik Blatand is not quite Japanese nor is he Danish like his adopted parents, but something in between. Meeting his girlfriend was no different from other interactions in his life as she immediately assumes he is Japanese, like her. Despite learning he is, in fact, Scandinavian, the two hit it off and before long Henrik has fallen in love with her “strangeness”. Not much time passes before he discovers why she is going to school in Paris- as a cure for a nervous breakdown. When she locks herself in her dorm room, nothing makes her leave it, she won’t budge. He leaves her food, and checks on her in a half-assed way as the days collect , but always remains focused on his obsession- translating Gadbois, a blind physicist’s, work. Between eating and using the bathroom, Henrik is consumed with his future. When he comes home one night, after meeting with Gadbois, he is met with sirens and discovers Fumiko has committed suicide.

Next, the reader is privy to a chapter titled ‘Don’t Carry Me Too Far Away’, all about a dissection room and cadavers. The student is dissecting a body, curious about the inner workings of things since girlhood. The reader feels very much a part of the experience as is the student, hungry for the forbidden, the hidden source of us all. It is Fumiko’s body that is being dissected, and someone who loved her, loves her still haunts the scene.

After her death, Henrik is troubled by guilt that he assisted, in a sense, in her suicide by way of avoidance. He sees her, feels her, thinks there are signs, that maybe she is still communicating. I found this fascinating, these little signs when he ignored Fumiko’s slow suicide so heartily. His mind is deeply troubled. Following Asian women, knowing they are certainly not Fumiko, but helpless to do anything else. Besides feeling haunted by his regrets, he struggles with the limbo of identities. He is neither one thing nor another, multilingual and measured by different standards, he is told the career he has chosen won’t be easy. Too, he often wonders about his blood parents at odd moments and his adoptive ones with joy that even if he doesn’t have their genes he picked up their characteristics and still the reader senses some distance in that thinking too, some comfortable remove. Time passes and his language skills are a great asset.

In later chapters, he becomes a dependable presence for his Goddaughter, Gémanuelle “Gém”, who often pretends Henrik (and not her real dad René) , is her father. He never says no to her, and with her father René, always absorbed in his film scripts or away on business, Henrik is ever present. She becomes as vital to him as a real daughter, filling a void, possibly one left long ago by Fumiko. Is this what lurks at the core of his loyalty and devotion to Gém, the absence of Fumiko? He upsets the balance of his friendship with René in playing daddy to Gém, leading to a temporary banishment from their life made worse by their relocation to Rome. It is there, under an Italian director, that René is pushing his little girl, against Henrik’s advice, to star in a strange film about crows and everything gets even weirder. In the film, she will star with a murder of crows surrounding her, befriending her. Henrik becomes, through the filming, a guardian of sorts. She is a gifted actress, a beautiful, golden child who is always asked to play roles for the men in her life. She doesn’t resemble Fumiko and yet serves as a chance of redemption in his failures. Why is he so desperate to protect her? From what? He is destined, in the end, to disappoint her as he did Fumiko.

It’s a novel that I feel I didn’t fully understand and yet there were moments that moved me. Henrik is a ghost himself, in many ways. Distant with Fumiko and overly present with Gém and yet why? Why as a stand in, rather than having his own life, his own family. This book is as broken as a dream and as strange and yet I kept reading. I don’t know that every reader will connect to it, but I did. No doubt it is a strange story. I’m curious about Kim’s future work.

Publication Date: August 3, 2021

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I was unable to read this as it was not available for kindle and I could not get it to download to either the app or my laptop. Disappointing,

This beautifully written debut suffers a bit from expectation setting. I agree with the earlier reviewer that this work is better read as a collection of three narratives with the same principle character. The confusion that I experienced with the format took a way a bit from the reading, but could have been remedied with a bit more explanation in the blurb. Beautifully drawn, but suffers from lack of plot/purpose.

I really like the author’s writing style. I enjoyed what I was reading but the formatting of the novel was really discouraging. I also felt the description didn’t really convey what this book was about. If it had been explained as three novellas with the same central character I think the flow would have been less disjointed. I think there are great character studies and you get good look at what makes you a native from a country. As someone with a good mental map of Paris I enjoyed the landmarks and descriptions. I thought the stories by themselves were interesting. However- in the end I felt cheated because it was barely about the relationship that started the story.

An Anthology of Displacement

This is a sneakily compelling examination of displacement in its many forms.

Our main character, Henrik, is Japanese born, but adopted and raised to be Danish by native Danes. For most of the period covered by the book he is a student in Paris, training fitfully and half-heartedly to be a translator. He is mildly obsessed with two-spirit people, and virtually every character has a birth identity and a culturally determined identity. He has a fine sense of the differences between Korean/Danish, Korean/French, Japanese/Danish, and the like, and almost all of his relationships turn in one way or another around these sorts of dualities.

Just to drive this all home, our hero is a translator, who translates back and forth between two languages, French and English, that are not his own. As a consequence he is almost always somewhere, either verbally or mentally, that isn't his proper, or comfortable, place. To this we add the fact that most of Henrik's interactions with people tend to revolve around both he and his companions speaking different languages that are not even native to wherever it is they are. It is no accident that many important events occur while Henrik is traveling or generally rambling about haphazardly and without any clear destination. In fact, I don't think Henrik ever got off a subway or a train at the station he originally intended to.

The book is organized as three novellas, and each novella is itself constructed out of distinct episodes. The first novella tells the story of Fumiko. The second and third novellas address "Before Fumiko" and "After Fumiko". Not to be too heavy handed, but the time line of the three is displaced, with the middle making up the beginning, and the episodes in the last two novellas not presented in a strictly linear fashion.

The opening novella, the Fumiko section, is the high point of the book. Fumiko never appears in the flesh. We meet her first through Henrik's memories and descriptions and then, after her death, as a spirit. Wandering and unpredictable, she is the ultimate displaced person, since she doesn't even stay on the earthly plane. This novella is eerie and unsettling and a bit unmoored. It is the section that all the blurbs reference. The final two novellas, Before and After, have their moments, but apart from some fine lines here and there they struck me as indulgent, beside the point, and not especially engaging.

This all sounds rather meta, and perhaps a bit arch, but that is not how it struck me. Memory is not linear, and stories that recount memorable events certainly aren't required to proceed along a strict timeline. Henrik, Fumiko, and all of the main secondary characters have a floating feel to them, are hard to pin down, and drift about, as is true of remembered people and events. For me, the approach worked.

To be fair there are some later bits that left me feeling like I was sitting on a plane next to someone who found telling me his life story was more entertaining than I did. There were more passing girlfriends and late night rambles than strictly necessary. But that's a minor quibble. This is a sneaky book, with an engagingly literary, poetic, and off kilter feel, and I welcomed Henrik's narrative company.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Although billed as a novel, Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost is actually best read as a trilogy of novellas that take place at different periods in the life of the protagonist, Henrik, a Japanese-Danish student living in Paris. It explores his love for three different women. The first of these women is Fumiko, whose “strangeness” he has fallen in love with, but whom he loses in the book’s first chapter. The second is a French girl, Luce, whom Henrik meets on the train to Paris, but whose phone number he fails to ask for. The third is with Gemanuelle, his six-year-old goddaughter.

This novel was written over the course of many years, and its long gestation shows. We go in and out of Henrik's life at years-long intervals: Children grow up. Relationships form and dissolve. A career stalls. All of these things happen offscreen, and we catch Henrik in the sort of in-between moments of his life. It doesn't feel cohesive, and it's up to the reader to decide if such a structure suits his tastes. It didn't work for me.

That said, Kim is an excellent sentence-level writer, eschewing both floweriness and over-simplicity. He treads fairly lightly, but there are never any missteps, and his intelligence shines through in the easy flow of his prose. He leans towards understatement and obliqueness, which I generally like, because it;s a sign that the writer trusts the intelligence of his audience, but I also found Henrik to be too stoic at times, and too reserved emotionally.

This is a first novel and Kim may develop a better handling of novel structure in the future. But perhaps his best career move would be to focus on publishing short stories.

A tale of three disparate narratives that never quite meshes into one cohesive whole. Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost is the story of aspiring translator Henrik and his mysterious girlfriend Fumiko. Part one concerns the beginning of Henrik's surreal relationship with Fumiko, which culminates in Fumiko locking herself in her apartment for weeks as Henrik struggles to find his identity in Paris. This part of the story is the best and most enthralling, dealing with language, relationships, and the struggles of immigrants in a foreign land.

The issue I had was with the remainder of the narrative. Split into two parts entitled "Before Fumiko" and "After Fumiko", I found that Henrik became a less interesting character in both sections and that the dramatic narrative surrounding Fumiko in the first section was nearly non-existent from the rest of the book. This gives the book the feel of a collection of novellas rather than a full narrative, and prevented me from remaining fully invested after the strong first half.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to
Farrar, Straus and Giroux**

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my review.
#NetGalley #FarrarStraussandGiroux #DavidHoonKim
This book tells the story of a man who is obsessed with the suicide of his girlfriend. This obsession drives him to examine himself and his past.
This author is very talented as a writer. His words are very poetic and his imagery is effective. The themes running throughout, such as grief, obsession, relationships etc. are well developed and deep.
This was a tough one. I had a lot of trouble caring about the main character, Henrik, or his plight.
The death of Fumiko was the main event of this, or so I thought. It was definitely the focus at first, but it seems to have been forgotten towards the middle and the end. I’m not entirely sure what the aim was there except maybe a character study. I didn’t find it very engaging.
I wish I had better things to say here as this story had a good foundation. This author is very talented. Unfortunately, overall this book wasn’t for me.

OK I'm very conflicted here because I think if the three sections of this book were three not-really-connected novellas, I would have liked them a little more. But they're not so...my main thing is that the first section (which I mostly really liked) sets up such a huge, purposefully mysterious event that feels like it's framed as The Central Event. It's not really a spoiler, like after I finished I reread the jacket copy and it reads to me like it's being marketed still as The Central Event, and it's referred to in the naming of all three sections.

But those second and third sections are really kind of different books that barely if ever refer back to or seem to relate meaningfully to The Central Event; the second one is a meander-y Parisian people-watching kind of situation and the third is this really fraught relationship study. Maybe with different expectations I would have liked it better - because I am not the person who will turndown a meander-y people-watching situation - but the purposeful disjointedness of this was kind of disappointing.

Individually there were things in all three sections I did like, but I was still held back a little by there being all these points of reference that were either too highbrow or just simply too French for me and therefore went way over my head, but maybe in other hands they would have enhanced the writing. I don't know, it gave me a lot to think about, but I didn't have the best time.

This book has many sections. These sections read like short stories. I just really don't like short stories. I rarely like when different narrators are in charge of different parts of a novel. I hang on to a narrative voice.

This book is fine. It is not just the very specific kind of book that I enjoy reading. Because I am still working on separating my biases from the book content, I will give this book five stars.

Lyrically written a haunting read.I was drawn right in by the characters the story.Kept me reading late into the night will be recommending.#netgalley #fsg

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. Henrik, Japanese born but raised by adoptive Danish parents, finds his life forever changed while at university in Paris, as his girlfriend Fumiko shuts herself away in her room and refuses to leave or answer the door. She’s done this before, but this time her door will be knocked down by the authorities and they will find that she has killed herself. From this episode, we jump back and forward in time to see other women in Henrik’s life. There’s brief talk about his adoptive mother being dead, an episode where he is in college in Denmark and his girlfriend leaves him for their shared thesis advisor, which prompts his movie to Paris. And years later, working as a translator, he becomes godfather to the daughter of his best friend, a fellow translator who he went to school with. His goddaughter, Gem, becomes like a daughter to him, which feels right to Henrik and inappropriate to others. It’s fascinating to see how these few relationships form the life Henrik ends up living.