PARIS IS A PARTY, PARIS IS A GHOST

A translator carries the burden of his girlfriend’s suicide through the City of Light and beyond.

Henrik Blatand, the narrator of much of Kim’s ethereal debut novel, is a Dane of Japanese descent attending college in Paris, and he acutely recognizes the host of identities thrust upon him: “I feared I was no one, in the end,” he thinks early on. He has a girlfriend, Fumiko, who’s Japanese, but as the novel opens she rapidly succumbs to depression, locking herself in her room and ultimately killing herself. The story that follows is less a plotted narrative than a group of set pieces that underscore Henrik’s uncertain sense of both self and place before and after that event. He seems to find himself in dark, liminal places throughout the city: the catacombs, the Metro, a remote pocket of the city a Korean acquaintance insists is a secret enclave of North Korea’s elite. Fumiko's presence lingers: Henrik mistakes another woman for her, and the medical student dissecting Fumiko’s corpse obsesses over who she was in life. Later, Henrik becomes godfather to a former classmate’s daughter, who’s being pressed to become an actress in B-list Italian horror films; subtly, the girl’s predicament stokes Henrik’s guilt over Fumiko. Kim is an elegant writer who knows how to set a mood, and the early portions of the novel thoughtfully interweave Henrik’s identity crisis and Fumiko’s loss without pat and easy gestures of grief. But Kim is so determined to strip Henrik of conventional emotion that he becomes awkward and static. Later, Henrik says, “I don’t know what I am now. Nothing, I guess.” Kim is a talented observer, but the novel betrays a frustrating lack of forward movement.

An overly careful and restrained tale of a character who’s a constant expat, emotionally and physically.