...haunting and surreal ... Vividly drawn characters...burst into the plot, only to disappear without trace ... With a confidence rare for a debutant, Kim trusts readers to make the connections between the novel’s seemingly disparate scenes and to attend to the ripples that hint at turmoil just beneath the tranquil surface of Henrik’s prose ... Though Henrik’s social isolation is partly a product of his position as an ethnically Asian man in an overwhelmingly white culture, Kim’s novel remains a powerful exploration of universal feelings of loneliness and of profound disconnection from others ... Paris Is a Party, Paris is a Ghost, with its patchwork plot, otherworldly visitations, and high-wire performance of a tonal flatness that just fails to conceal the anguish beneath will likely try the patience of some readers too far. Those willing to immerse themselves in its mysterious and forlorn landscapes will be amply rewarded by this startlingly original debut.

...it can be tempting to read Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost as an immigrant’s tale, a doleful, beautifully written study of the confused yearnings and scars of exile. But the identity crisis here is deeper, roiled by the universal, often doomed impulse to imbue meaning where it no longer exists ... the narrative starts to wander, though confidently, like a tour guide trying not to show that he’s moseyed off route, and one might complain that the whole book is not quite a novel but a collection of tangents, auspicious starts ... Imperfect and meandering, but full of meticulously rendered thinking, Kim’s telling is a fine way out.

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 Henrik’s life and which explore his love for three different women ... A fairly long period of Henrik’s life is covered in the novel, roughly the same period it took Kim to write the book. This makes it inevitable that the passage of time should be one the novel’s central themes ... This in-and-out structure of the story is not uninteresting, and a patient and generous reader might find in the book something of the charm of the Up! documentary series in which the audience returns to the same group of people at years-long intervals throughout their lives, seeing how they’ve changed ... Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the book is the way in which Kim’s voice has stayed constant throughout the novel’s long gestation. Kim is an excellent sentence-level writer, eschewing both floweriness and over-simplicity. He treads lightly, but there are never any missteps, and his intelligence shines through in the easy flow of his prose ... yet, I had difficulty connecting emotionally with Kim’s story or any of his characters. Perhaps it’s the influence of Hemingway ... There is indeed a great deal of sorrow in this book. I just wish Henrik had expressed more of it sooner.

His erudite prose is undeniably sublime and polished (his vocabulary remarkably extensive—anechoic, astrakhan, tatterdemalion) but perhaps too much of many good things doesn't coalesce successfully here, resulting in distracting missteps and disconnects. Kim's debut hasn't quite accomplished all that it could and should. The exquisite beauty of his composition--combining words, crafting sentences--however, bodes well for perfecting future narratives.

Henrik’s narration, which stretches over more than a decade, is portioned into halting episodes about friends and lovers whose role in his life tend to be spectral and short-lived ... The book’s most arresting chapter is an outlier narrated by a medical student who dissects Fumiko’s corpse ... From this ghostly Paris comes a sensitive, vague and often maddeningly insubstantial novel. Its frustrations are illustrative of a crisis in the subject and form of a literature that takes trauma to be the defining quality of personhood ... because Mr. Kim’s [Paris] is characterized by an inviolable sense of detachment, it is doomed to remain unrealized, a shadowy backdrop for his sad hero’s tail-swallowing cycle of fear and regret.

Kim has managed to nurse to life is a haunting, surreal story of loss, and of being lost ... The question of identity is an ever-shifting thing in Kim’s novel, and he uses relationships between expats to elucidate some of the surprising revelations every immigrant encounters ... Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost, manages to strike a darkly comic tone even while recounting suicides and hate crimes ... But one can always sense the abyss lying just beneath the thick, palatable layer of humor ... There is one area in which Kim’s true passion shines through the cracks: his love for translation.

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 ... 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' ... Kim is an expert writer at the sentence level—each paragraph is written intricately enough to stand alone.

Debut novelist Kim takes readers on a dreamlike journey through Paris. With flowing language and lavish detail, he delves deep into the 'what if’s' of infinite possibilities and explores how language and translations can affect one’s perspectives and experiences.

Kim’s splendid if scattered debut centers on a Paris university student who is left reeling after his girlfriend’s death ... While there are many beautiful passages of longing (Henrik remembers falling in love with Fumiko’s 'strangeness'), the incurably woebegone narrator lacks a clear motive, which will leave readers feeling puzzled.