Faraway the Southern Sky

The young man arrived in Paris, a refugee from political repression, just as World War I was raging to a close. He came with just a few coins in his pocket, a painfully shy twentysomething who stammered when he spoke in public, though he had sailed the world as a lowly deckhand. He moved into a dingy hotel on a cul-de-sac in Montmartre, falling into a demimonde populated by radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless and rebellious.

When, half a dozen years later, he stole out of town on a train bound for the young Soviet Union, he had emerged as the fiery, passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a founder of the French Communist Party. In between had been years living under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments, arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo shops, revolutionary writing in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and meetings with Maurice Chevalier and Colette. All the while, he was being dogged by French spies—much of what we know about the young man's Paris years is thanks to near-total police surveillance of him, down to accounts of arguments he had with friends at home.

Joseph Andras recalls Ho Chi Minh's early years and walks the same Paris neighbourhoods today. Searching for traces of the past in the streets of today, the author hears echoes of other angry histories, from terror attacks to tent encampments of the houseless to the protests of the Gilets jaunes. Ultimately, this slim, intensely lyrical, and genre-bending book becomes a meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the poor, the free, the outcast, and the rebellious—people who may or may not find a place in history books but without whom history could not be written.

Faraway the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras is a vivid exploration of forgotten lives and the complex tapestry of history.