Faraway the Southern Sky
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Joseph Andras writes with the swiftness of lightning."
–Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
A biographical historical fiction retelling of Ho Chi Minh's immigration and radical life in underground Paris in the 1920s
Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething who stammered when he spoke in public, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, the radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless, and rebellious.
Six years later, he boarded a train bound for the young Soviet Union as the fiery, passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a founder of the French Communist Party. He had lived under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments. There had been arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo shops, revolutionary writing in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and meetings with Chaplin and Colette, all while being dogged by French spies—much of what we know about the young man’s Paris years is thanks to that surveillance, down to accounts of arguments he had with friends at home.
Searching for traces of the past in the streets of today, Joseph Andras hears echoes of other angry histories, from terror attacks to tent encampments to the protests of the Gilets jaunes. This intensely lyrical, genre-bending book is a meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the poor, the free, the outcast, and the rebellious—people who might not find a place in history books but without whom history could not be written.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eloquent and impassioned novella, Andras (Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us) charts a course through contemporary Paris in the footsteps of Vietnamese leader Hô Chí Minh, who lived in the French capital in the 1910s and '20s, and reflects on the nature of revolutionary movements. Andras affectionately and romantically describes Hô as a "moneyless vagabond" who "changed names like he changed shirts, sweating in the hope, no less, of making us all equal at last." Under the name Nguyên Tât Thanh, he left his home in the French protectorate of Annam and joined a socialist organization in Paris. As he began writing about Indochina for socialist and communist publications, he quickly gained the attention of his comrades—as well as of the French police, who began to surveil his every move. While visiting sites where Nguyên lived and worked, Andras renders the city's daily rhythms ("A restaurant sign flickers; wheels toing and froing; the city growls, fawn gray, while the gutter scoffs down water") and reflects on the ways in which revolutionary idealism is often marred by violence ("Nothing casts a shadow over you quite like fratricidal blood"). Along the way, his flâneur's chronicle builds to a richly layered and emotionally honest reckoning with the promises and failures of a great leader. Andras's meditation strikes a nerve.
