Proving You Know vs. Bringing Others Along: A Review

28 Sep, 2025

Let’s just get right to the point: David Hoon Kim’s Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost drove me up the wall, thanks to one particular tendency that’s hardly unique to the author or to this book. I’m talking about the habit of place-name dropping, which here, means instances like the following: our protagonist Henrik says he went “down the rue Victor-Cousin until I reached the rue Saint-Jacques. Near the entrances of Gibert Joseph and spilling out onto the sidewalk were the usual discounted books.” So instead of telling us that his protagonist hoofed it from campus to a bookstore, Kim assumes we’ll know where these streets are and whether there’s anything special about them, how far or long this route entails walking—and that Gibert Joseph is a bookstore chain, and not, say, a subway stop where a bunch of sale tables have been laid out. Or in a later episode in Rome, having arrived in the train station, Henrik “walked past the payphone again, past the Relay,… If I kept walking, I would reach the exit, and beyond it the piazza del Cinquecento. But then, through the window of the aptly named La Fenestro, I saw a familiar silhouette…”¹ Instead of giving us information that most readers could appreciate (offering something more imagistic instead of just markers or labels), Kim is essentially signaling that these descriptions will only be meaningful to the in-crowd deeply familiar with Paris streets, neighborhoods, and stores; with the layout of Rome’s Termini Train Station and European news stand chains.² With the Rome scene, for example, it wouldn’t be hard to describe a frantic search for your friend in a crowded transportation hub, even without reference to the brands or named spots found in or near it at the time.

There’s also the related tendency to toss in untranslated (mostly) French phrases when there’s no need at all to do so, when there’s no difference in definition or inherent feeling when described in either language. So for instance, instead of informing us that Henrik was standing in the Termini station, duffel bag or overnight bag in hand, we’re told that he was hanging around “holding [his] sac de voyage.” Later on and still in Rome, instead of trusting that we’ll picture a chauffeur as intended if we’re told his hair is tousled, Kim forces readers who don’t speak French (or even speak it at at least the intermediate level) to make some guesses about what it might mean that our man was met by “a uniformed driver… [sporting] ébouriffé white hair.”³

This sort of casual toss-out of a foreign term might have been common up through early twentieth-century literature, where the educated classes assumed to be reading important novels may have been familiar with the French that aristocratic characters dropped to prove they belonged, or to keep secrets from the servants. Even then, the practice felt—and was often likely meant to feel—artificial and pretentious, and it seems doubly so here, a barely disguised show of one-upmanship between young adults who’ve trained and backpacked around Europe and earned their badge of worldliness.

It resembles, in fact, an early scene in Manhattan, in which Diane Keaton’s character Mary demands, “Ah, well how ‘bout Vincent Van /Gachhh/?”⁴ Those few seconds are skewering precisely this sort of linguistic and cultural strutting, and it would have fit right in had Mary had the group pause to let her find something in her sac de voyage. It’s admittedly easier, though, to achieve in films the entire feel of the scene, from location to sense of character to dialogue, where tone and intonation and in this case, the “what the hell?” reactions make it clear how this snobbery is intended. Where, in other words, we’re being shown and not told where we are, let in on how people are acting as they walk down a street that has to be in New York (look at the title, after all), but isn’t explicitly named. There are visual cues, of course—in this movie, the Queensborough/59th Street Bridge is an obvious one—but you’re set down in front of and within them and are being trusted to try on how it feels to be there.

It’s logical that I’d choose Woody Allen’s work to contrast with Paris… Ghost’s form of situating readers. In so much of what Allen has done, after all, the city in which the story is set is an essential part of that story—often serving pretty much as a character in itself. But even where a given city is being explicitly celebrated (Manhattan, Midnight in Paris, To Rome with Love), we’re not treated to a lesson in street or place names, history or trivia, to remember for your next networking conversation. We’re dropped instead into an atmosphere and given enough sensory information to let it sink in, left to find out more on our own about the factual and historical particulars later on if we so desire. The mood, not the checking of locational boxes, is the important thing. As I said, this just seems easier to pull off in the movies than in any written medium. And yet, it’s been done well in books, too.

Take Marcel Proust, who spends pages and pages after pointing to a place, and maybe even a particular street or square within it, giving a full description of the area—and in doing so, telling us what it means for and to him. In other words, in pulling us into the many worlds of Combray, Paris, Balbec, and more, Proust doesn’t assume that being familiar with or even sharing the same geographical space at the same moment means walking away with the same understanding or impression of it. The guy was infinitely wordy—but that’s not why he never would have said (as happened in Paris… Ghost) he peeked into Le Fleurus (not just “a café”) to see what was going on, left it at that, and expected us to think, Ah yes, Le Fleurus. We’re on the same page, my friend. Say no more. Proust recognized even in Marcel’s own reflections about a place how “the safe custody of names” could box the reality of a city or landscape into little more than a tourist poster, albeit one that had a unique feeling or meaning for him, and not necessarily anyone else. And so, as opposed to the casual and unelaborated-upon remark that you had brunch at [the New York restaurant] Balthazar before taking a stroll, Proust’s readers are treated to full immersion in what’s behind the names he mentions for him. We’re never left with the sense that the author feels some established or establishment expectation is appropriate or even possible. And even if we walk away from the text with only a partial view of the particular location, we’re probably not unclear about what’s happening there in that moment, what it looks and sounds like at a given instant, why it’s significant or why we should care.⁵

Maybe I’m being unfair: Kim’s Henrik is a translator, adopted from Japan by a Danish family, living in Paris, visiting people in Rome… Is all this phrasing and name-checking intended as a way for him to try and ground himself in multiple cultural and linguistic flows, to make some point about never feeling at home anywhere or in any language? The problem with that possibility is that Henrik has always felt Danish, and when under stress, reverts to the language he grew up in.⁶ So I don’t believe this authorial tendency, at least, was meant to make some larger point about the rootlessness of the translating life or of existence as a transracial/-cultural adoptee.

Maybe it’s a case, then, of being too reliant on real-world facts to succeed in telling a convincing piece of fiction, a simple fear of getting the real-world facts wrong? Could be; back when I was still trying to write fiction, that problem always dogged me. I couldn’t let myself just believe or trust in the world I’d created and let it speak for itself, and that’s what may be happening here, especially since the narrative makes years-long leaps, and it’s sometimes unclear how events in Henrik’s life are supposed to be connected. Yes, the protagonist feels a connection between Fumiko, a woman he failed in the past and Gém, a girl he’s failed now, and that much does make sense. But the journey between beginning and end points, though often engagingly related (in spite of the problems already mentioned), can be rough.

Probably the most noticeable stumbling block is the fact that the second chapter only seems connected to the rest of the book via the presence of a dead woman introduced in the first. You think you’re being introduced to a third character who’ll have a different view of Fumiko’s life, or eventually connect up with Henrik or the rest of the story or illuminate it in some way—but no dice. Instead of the loaded rifle Anton Chekhov said shouldn’t be featured early in a play if it’s not going to go off later, it’s a whole chapter that leaves you wondering how or whether it’ll ever be brought back in or shed any light on the tale at all.⁷ When added up with the additional fact that it’s never very clear exactly how what happened to Gém was traumatic, or why Henrik’s really to be blamed (if he is), everything just felt too loosely held together—felt as if the author’s fear of being too obvious resulted in being too obscure—to make me excited about the book.

Writing, to state it simply, is hard, and novel-writing extremely hard. Negative as I’ve sounded about it this whole time, I really wanted Paris… Ghost to work, even if only because authors (usually) just don’t toss off work on a whim and not care how it’s received. If Kim writes another novel, I might read it, just to see whether it feels more confident, I guess—or at least to see whether he leaves us with more than names as shortcuts to fill in for something more robust.

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