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A Novel
by Joseph Andras
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.
"In this eloquent and impassioned novella, Andras charts a course through contemporary Paris in the footsteps of Vietnamese leader Hô Chí Minh ... 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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A buzzing, bustling, genre-blending book that balances fact and fiction ... the most successful passages arise when Andras extracts truth from either fact or fiction to depict a more real-seeming person behind the historical giant, as when a young Hô Chí Minh borrows Marx's Capital from a Parisian library and, rather than peruse and annotate its pages, 'the big book served as his pillow.'" —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Faraway the Southern Sky was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joseph Andras is the author of the novels Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us, Ainsi nous leur faisons la guerre, and Au loin le ciel du Sud. Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us was adapted for the cinema (as Faithful) by Hélier Cisterne and was awarded the Prix Goncourt for First Novel. But Andras refused the prize, explaining his belief that "competition and rivalry were foreign to writing and creation". He lives in Le Havre.
Simon Leser is a writer, critic, and translator currently living in New York, and working towards a doctorate in French literature at NYU.
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