Faraway the Southern Sky

Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as a young man, a refugee from political repression, just as World War I was sputtering to a close. When, six 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.

He spent these years living under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments, getting arrested and beaten, working jobs in restaurants and photo shops, writing revolutionary manifestos in the reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale, and meeting with Maurice Chevalier and Colette, all while 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.

Joseph Andras recalls Ho Chi Minh's early years and walks Ho's Paris neighborhoods. 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 that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction becomes a meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the 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.