KIM HOON | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

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 doppelganger, 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.

David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stegner Program. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Brins d'éternité, Le Sabord and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle. He has been awarded fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the MacDowell Colony and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost is his first book. He writes in English and in French.