The Language of Distortion: On David Hoon Kim's "Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost"

David Hoon Kim | Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2021 | 256 Pages

Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost is the debut novel by Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate David Hoon Kim, a writer who works in English and French. Like Kim himself, the book’s narrator, Henrik Blatand, is a translator caught between languages and identities. Henrik is a Japanese adoptee living in Paris, raised by Danish parents, and haunted by a Japanese girlfriend, Fumiko. Fumiko’s absence initiates the story, and her death is the event through which Henrik divides the chronology of his life. She appears in flesh only once, on the table of a cadaver lab, where her body is dissected by medical students who understand parts of her that Henrik never will. 

Kim is a Korean-American writer who spent a large portion of his life in France before moving to the Midwest for graduate school, where he began writing fiction in English for the first time, later attending the Stegner Creative Writing Program at Stanford. He began working on the story that would grow into Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost around fourteen years ago—the first portion, Sweetheart Sorrow, originally appeared in the New Yorker in 2007, but the project was abandoned for years before being revisited. Kim follows his novel’s narrator, Henrik, over a similarly long span of time, tracing the circuitous outline of his early to mid-adulthood. 

Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost is a novel (or, arguably, a set of related novellas) characterized by distortion, set in a reality that isn’t consistently shared between different people or over time. Strangers on the street reply to thoughts that Henrik believes he hasn’t said; apparitions appear out his window; crows haunt his closest friends. Nobody can see each other clearly, if they see each other at all: Henrik is always making eye contact with people on the street only to realize that they’re searching for something beyond him, or else he’s failing to observe the people he loves most, finding them impossible to know. In this book, a ghost is, at times, a literal (possible) ghost, but a ghost is also what it means to never belong fully to one state or the other, unable to communicate effectively or find a solid home. To feel Danish, to be perceived as Japanese, to live in neither country—a ghost is everything you reach out for that disappears in your hand, it’s the hand grasping and the absence it finds. An Anne Carson quote appears in the text in which she describes “most objects in the room” as ghosts, as well as Paris itself.

It feels a little obvious to connect an eerie novel (complete with a disappearing cat) to Haruki Murakami (who Kim lists as an influence) and the literary landscape he shaped. The most striking connection, though, might be the shared desire to write in languages in which they can’t feel at home. Murakami composed his first book in non-native English, which he then translated back to Japanese. The limitation, he wrote, stripped his work of extraneous fat. Kim, conversely,  describes himself as an amalgamation of two writers—with one voice composed in English, and the other in French.

For Henrik, translation offers “the prospect of dealing, for a change, with someone else’s thoughts—and temporarily escaping [his own.]” Other characters hide behind the language of scientific jargon, using its difficulty to mask an emptiness behind it. Language provides a form of displacement, and Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost explores how unfamiliar tongues compel us to rewrite the worlds we’re situated within. In school, Henrik translates a poem about crows a dozen times in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter. He changes the animal in his translation to recreate the original poem’s rhyme, attempting to match what the language has generated beyond its literal translation. During Henrik’s relationship with Fumiko, they speak to each other in French—a non-native language for both of them—and at first the gap between them excites him. Her perception of him as foreign validates his own Danishness. He thinks that he has “fallen in love with [her] strangeness.” He writes that “An unforeseeable side effect of communicating in a language foreign to both of us was that it allowed me to forget, sometimes, that she was Japanese. A foreign language allows one to rename the world and everything in it.” He will later mistranslate her last words. 

Linguistic gaps create a sense of distortion, and Kim leans into this altered sense of reality, building a strangeness that can become a type of home. Although he says near the beginning that he’s been in France “long enough to feel like an exile, not long enough to feel French,” Henrik doesn’t truly leave Paris, or at least his exile, for the rest of the book.

Switching between one language and another forces one to reconsider what exactly it is that one is trying to say. What Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost is trying to say, exactly, is not straightforward. It’s about loss and language but it’s also about, as Henrik put it, “an exhilarating loneliness,” about finding yourself in the apartment of two strangers after an ambiguous translation incident “wondering if they had invited me up here or if I had invited myself [...] driven by a familiar mixture of boredom and curiosity and despair.” One of the most enjoyable elements of the book grows from characters whose actions and motivations are hard to make sense of—the desire to mistranslate your own work, to lie about a species of fish, to dissect a human body—how sharply Kim captures the way that many of us float around the world, unable to name what it is that moves us to do one thing rather than another.

Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost is a long title but a short read. Kim is an expert writer at the sentence level—each paragraph is written intricately enough to stand alone. It would be unfair to say this is a book where nothing happens, because, despite the meandering train rides and Parisian wandering, something does—but what happens occurs quietly. There are no comprehensive answers offered to Henrik, or to the reader. What’s offered instead is a type of lucidity—a glance at the wound, and then the years of wandering and chatter and chores that can take your mind away from it; the act of filling your mind with someone else’s voice to avoid your own; the effort it takes to avoid looking at the pain directly. It’s a book about what it means to spend your adulthood wandering around Europe, unable to join the Danish or the French, the Japanese or the English, the living or the dead.