A Parisian from Kansas

the long version

A Parisian from Kansas is a quixotic, erotic, and thoroughly spellbinding work about expatriate life in Paris, about a writer creating a novel, and about a raw-boned, HIV-positive American named Darren Swenson who wants to be made immortal in the book he asks Philippe Tapon to write. Shockingly graphic, yet delicately structured, A Parisian from Kansas folds back in upon itself as Darren visits his farmer parents in Kansas, meets lovers, and dies several times as the action accelerates toward a tragic but life-affirming finale. With Paris as a backdrop and an all-pervasive presence, Philippe Tapon, both character and author, writes about heiresses, intellectuals, the devil himself, and jeunesse doree, as he follows the witty, iconoclastic Darren's last days of life. A Boswell to this Johnson from Kansas, he is scribbling madly all the while. The result is alternatively phantasmagoric, hallucinatory, and journalistic - an eyewitness account of a man's dying and a novel's being born.