Faraway the Southern Sky
Readers walk along the streets of Paris, retracing the steps taken by Vietnamese leader Hô Chí Minh in the 1920s, noting the addresses where he once lodged, the hotel where he was once an apprentice cook, the establishment where he once retouched photographs, and the hospital where he once recovered from a phlegmon of the shoulder. Readers pass locations burned into revolutionary history—Charonne metro station, where protestors seeking peace in Algeria were gunned down in 1962, and a little way further along Charonne Street, where barricades rose in the 1871 Commune against soldiers of the Third Republic.
The small details of Hô’s life contrast with the trappings of the everyday in 2024—a pair of thirty-somethings jogging, a restaurant sign flickering, a woman in “formless gray” and another whose scarf is as orange as her shopping cart.
This is the third book by Andras, noted for bringing to present-day light the actions of socialist radicals and revolutionaries that were not ever fully known or have been forgotten, such as Fernand Iveton, an anti-war Communist activist guillotined for carrying a bomb that never exploded (Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, 2016) and Alphonse Dianon, a Zapatista (Kanaky, 2018).
Faraway the Southern Sky is revealing: Hô’s futile attempts to present the demands of the Annamite (Vietnamese) people to the Versailles Treaty conference in 1919 under the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quâc. Text is often poetic: “Paris drops itself in a blue that can only announce the night.” The intent is insightful: “The dead haunt only the fabulist minds of the living. ‘Here lies’ obstructs the image. ‘Here lived’ stimulates it.”
More than a read. An experience.
