At the start of “Faraway the Southern Sky,” his most recent novel to be translated into English (by Simon Leser, who also translated “Tomorrow They Won’t Dare”), Andras, or his narrator, announces that he is not much attracted to the story of “Ho Chi Minh the icon,” one of those men on horseback whom Hegel might have called a world-historical figure. He wants to know — uncover — a different man: a young Vietnamese vagabond in postwar Paris who “changed names like he changed shirts,” who “slept in pigsties, wrote articles in a language his mother had never sung to him in, and roamed Paris under the eyes of devious cops.”
“He wasn’t called Ho Chi Minh,” Andras tells us — not yet anyway: Born at the end of the 19th century (the exact year is up for debate), he was first known as Nguyen Sinh Cung (and later Nguyen Tat Thanh), a “native of Hoang Tru, a village somewhere in the north” of Vietnam. The son of a middle-class family, he was afforded a Western education, where he was exposed to the tenets of France’s Third Republic, including the maxim of “Liberté Égalité Fraternité,” which engendered in him his first doubts about life under French rule. “Ho Chi Minh said that it piqued his interest as a teenager,” Andras writes, “how, in short, could the pleasant maxim of Desmoulins, Forty-Eighters, and Communards end up in the buttonholes of grandees and infantrymen?”
When he finally arrived in Paris — in 1917, 1918 or 1919, but historians can’t seem to agree — it was after nearly a decade of wandering. He had left Vietnam on a steamboat heading to Marseille, flipping through odd jobs and ports of call. Andras is drawn to Ho during this period, perhaps, because he was something of a Zelig-like figure, lurking in the frame of history, rather than someone who was in the process of making it: In a London hotel, he worked for the great French chef Escoffier, who advised him to settle down and become a cook; he apparently met Charlie Chaplin while at sea and was even said to resemble the actor; and when he was in Paris he was rebuffed by heads of state, like Woodrow Wilson and Georges Clemenceau, who refused to meet with him and his fellow Vietnamese nationalists. Working alongside these comrades, the Groupe des patriotes annamites (the Group of Vietnamese Patriots), he became a writer in the leftist press, and adopted a pseudonym and pen name, Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”).
It was in Paris, Andras’s fiction suggests, that Ho Chi Minh was forged. There, in a city scarred by its own revolutions, one of France’s colonial subjects became radicalized. Andras does not tell the story of Ho’s transformation in chronological order: His book instead conforms to the shape of a walk that its unnamed narrator takes across the arrondissements of Paris where Ho lived. As the walk unfolds, it becomes clear that Paris is as much the protagonist of the story as Ho. Political ruptures (past, present and future) that occurred steps away from the apartments the future Vietnamese leader reportedly occupied haunt and shape the city — the Paris commune of 1871, the massacre of Algerian protesters in 1961, demonstrations by the Gilets Jaunes in 2018.
Peripatetic novels are hardly unique — from Woolf to Sebald, many have used roadways to gesture at subjects of greater import — but what makes Andras’s strolling story all his own is his zeal and yearning. That tone can sometimes veer into the melodramatic or florid (“We look upon the revolutionary as one might hold a cigarette for the friend who stepped away: not entirely sure what to do with it”), but the length of the book (less than 80 pages) keeps Andras’s narrative taut and focused enough to forgive its occasional moments of grandeur. Still, the proclamations are underlined by a sense of purpose: Andras wants his readers to join him in protest. Near the end of the novel, the narrator passes by a police barricade and thinks longingly of a demonstration he remembers: “A capital rising up, you don’t see that every day.”
For Andras, the very geography of Paris offers a political education for the hungry and curious. As the historian Ian Birchall has argued in the New Left Review, “The revolts which finally brought an end to the French empire were to some extent prepared in the very heart of French imperialism, the city of Paris.” It was a hothouse of dissident activity, where migrants from all of France’s colonies congregated, to find work but also solidarity. While Andras goes into great detail in his reconstruction of Ho’s youthful period — how he tried to teach himself Marxism but ended up using the copy of “Capital” he borrowed from the library as a pillow; how he became a founding member of the French Communist Party but broke with his new allies after he discovered they didn’t really care about the colonial question — the author follows the revolutionary trail in Paris to understand the city anew.
The discomfiting contradiction at the heart of this project, one to which Andras admits, is how to account for the violence Ho would eventually become associated with: “The Vietnamese Communist regime shot innocents, locked up others for their opinions, crushed any and all criticism, falsified numbers, forced into exile some of its most loyal servants, and, like the hated capitalists, concentrated power at the top.” He notes that Ho was sidelined in his later years, made a “minority of his own party, almost powerless, as if spitting in the wind, the mummified symbol of national reunification.” Andras insists, though, that Ho Chi Minh isn’t the person he cares about: He wants to know more about Ngyuen the Patriot. He wants to know how a man like him came to be reborn in a city where radical change, for better and for worse, always seems possible.
Kevin Lozano is the Nation’s associate literary editor.
By Joseph Andras, translated from French by Simon Leser
