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Faraway the Southern Sky Joseph Andras

Faraway the Southern Sky By Joseph Andras

Faraway the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras


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Summary

Ho Chi Minh's lost formative years in Paris

Faraway the Southern Sky Summary

Faraway the Southern Sky: A Novel by Joseph Andras

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, 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.

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.

Praise for Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us
- "Electrifying ... insists on plumbing the thorniest details of history's scandal, suggesting-convincingly-that certain truths are best revealed in fiction." Kaiama L. Glover, New York Times
- "A very beautiful book to reflect on: when a 'traitor' preserves our 'dignity.'" Eric Vuillard, author of The War of the Poor and The Order of the Day
- "An austerely compelling account ... Andras's bleak account is leavened by passages of vibrant lyricism." Laura Garmeson, Times Literary Supplement
- "Andras delivers a brisk, angry slap of outraged idealism . Powerful." Boyd Tonkin, Spectator
- "Tightly coiled ... Andras is fastidious about adhering to the known facts. His restraint is commendable." Literary Review

Faraway the Southern Sky Reviews

In this eloquent and impassioned novella, Andras charts a course through contemporary Paris in the footsteps of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh ... his flaneur'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. -- Starred Review * Publishers Weekly *
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 H? Chi 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 *

About Joseph Andras

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 Helier 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.

Additional information

NGR9781804291719
9781804291719
1804291714
Faraway the Southern Sky: A Novel by Joseph Andras
New
Paperback
Verso Books
2024-05-21
96
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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