“Faraway the Southern Sky” by Joseph Andras

Hô Chí Minh was also a poet. From 1890-1969, Hô Chí Minh lived many lives in his seventy-nine years, a broad range of diverse roles and contributions that have attained a continued worldwide influence, from anti-imperialist Marxist-Leninst revolutionary, Vietnamese nationalist, political leader, philosophical thinker, newspaper founder, and columnist. His complete published writings available in English runs to fifteen volumes. While some of these remarkable and versatile aspects are better known than others (and continue to be regarded across the globe with varying degrees of controversy), it is without doubt quite intriguing that before becoming the first prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, the legendary anti-colonialist affectionately called “Uncle Hô” by his fellow Vietnamese, kept a diary in poetry while serving fourteen months in a South China prison, charged in 1942 with being a spy. With a title based on a line (“Scanning afar the Southern sky, / I think of my friends”) in that collection, Faraway the Southern Sky is the latest novel by Joseph Andras, elegantly translated from the French by Simon Leser.

Set in the “monster” of Paris after World War I, Andras focuses on Hô Chí Minh as a young dreamer in exile, “gaunt, his complexion sallow … face emaciated, eyes at once soft and marked by fire.” He is evolving into the political leader he would become. In fact, Andras calls the hero of this tale Nguyên Ái Quôc, one of many aliases Hô Chí Minh used during his hardscrabble “moneyless vagabond” early days on the margin of French colonial society. Intentionally avoiding a deeper confrontation that would grapple and seriously reckon with the dynamic inter-penetrating layers that comprise the many facets of “Hô Chí Minh the icon, revered Supreme Leader … illustrious goatee enthroned in history somewhere between Lenin and Gandhi,” Faraway the Southern Sky is strictly limited to the four years or so prior to Nguyên departing Paris for Moscow in 1923, ostensibly sketching the enigmatic contours of an ambitious twenty-something budding intellectual, a “calm man, serious, Spartan, punctual, obstinate, grim, concrete,” sustaining himself on “bread, milk, and the occasional sausage,” hiding from racist cops along shadowy Parisian backstreets, living in libraries, reading any book he can scrounge, “warming his bed with a hot brick wrapped in old newspapers,” even using Marx’s Capital as a pillow to sleep on.

 

Faraway the Southern Sky, Joseph Andras, Simon Leser (trans) (Verso, May 2024)
Faraway the Southern Sky, Joseph Andras, Simon Leser (trans) (Verso, May 2024)

Mixing elements of journalism, political critique, and personal essay, this hybrid novel has little in common with North American English-language storytelling techniques, though the style and structure of Faraway the Southern Sky is less unusual in Europe. French literary culture is filled with inventive works widely applying the liberating, complex approach to fictional narrative that Andras expertly employs. For this reason alone, an English-only, non-French speaking audience might find this sophisticated novel particularly fascinating.

Rather than adopting the voice of someone from Vietnam, or projecting into the mind of Hô Chí Minh, Andras has chosen an anonymous depersonalized narrator of unidentified gender presented in the rarely used—for Anglophone novels—second person: “You walk alongside a barrier …You get to a train station.” This introduces a large measure of uncertainty, suspicion, and ambiguity, challenging what might be confidently assumed by common sense to be sure-footed reality. Perhaps this is intended to short circuit accusations of cultural appropriation, given that Andras is a citizen of his subject’s former colonizing nation. But the great virtue of the kind of radical unreliability found here—where truth, authenticity and authorial intent are undecidable, echoing the mysterious gap in Nguyên’s actual biographical history during this period—is its depiction of fate and identity not as a closed terrain, but an open space infused with an unpredictable, wild existential freedom. When nothing is verifiable, anyone can do anything. There are no restrictions, no safe ground. Adding to these levels of instability, reports from France indicate that even the name of the author on the cover of the book, “Joseph Andras,” is a pseudonym.

Translated in a flat but lyrical tone (“The sky is like a sea the wind forgot”), what seems to be the faithful recollection of someone from northern France, traveling south to Paris on a pilgrimage “in search of … Nguyên the Patriot,” the narrator describes a walking tour that revisits where Nguyên lived and worked. Thinking about comrades he may have known, and women he might have loved, each geographic locale offers a vital bit of insight into Nguyên’s complicated, maturing personality. Faraway the Southern Sky also attempts to explicitly connect Nguyên with the larger sweep of French leftist politics, a legacy harkening back to the 1871 Paris Commune, reverberating as far forward as the “yellow vest” working class movement of 2015.

 

Supposedly based on publicly available government dossiers, a wealth of police surveillance reports that testify to Nguyên enduring hardships as he moves in circles of extreme poverty, he is shown living with “the losers, the ignored, the third-rates”, those who were “laid low under shoddy stars, not even worth a penny.” Among these suffering souls he “slept in pigsties, wrote articles in a language his mother had never sung to him in” and “knocked about between cats and dogs.” Spending his daylight hours, first as a cook, then as a developer of photographs, Nguyên participates in clandestine evening meetings with his “brothers in the order of the Night”, where he passionately “spoke of world proletarian revolution … and you can imagine the pride overcoming him as he did so.” Nguyên always comes across as fiercely disciplined: “The needle in his compass pointing only with great care, unflappably, in one direction: the fate of the colonies.” His growing reputation as an outspoken anti-colonialist in the lively cosmopolitan Vietnamese émigré community indisputably made him “the center, the soul of the … movement.” With this uptick in status, Nguyên attracted increased governmental scrutiny:

 

His mail was inspected, his comings and goings noted down to the minute, the papers he bought indexed, the visitors he received listed, the metros he took logged.

 

What of any hints indicating possible romantic relationships? Diseases like bronchitis and tuberculosis were rampant in 1920s Paris, so Nguyên unsurprisingly winds up at Cochin Hospital with a bacterial infection. Not long after, a mysterious visitor appears:

 

A spy noted that a young woman of eighteen years, presented in a report as his mistress, regularly came to see him. Did she really share his daily life and his bed? Did he really give up a little bit of that heart so entirely devoted to politics … No one knows.

 

Counter-intelligence agents can’t suss her identity despite scouring the city. Once fully recovered, however, Nguyên is undeterred. He reapplies himself to revolution. Haunting the Bibliothèque Nationale every day to feed his desire for knowledge, he devours Lenin and Trotsky and Rousseau and Hugo in a “whirl” of excitement, “reading books so as to write his own.” Then, after four years, Nyguên is armed with a fake Chinese passport, and boards a train to Berlin, eventually destined for Moscow, eluding the police officers eager to seize him. He wants to study Soviet communism up close:

 

To his comrades he called brothers, he left a letter saying that while their work hadn’t been without merit, it was time to go further still: return to their country, rally the masses, wrest independence.

 

It will be another twenty-two years before Nguyên assumes the office of Vietnam’s prime minister.

 

Whether the elements comprising Faraway the Southern Sky are invented or harvested from genuine primary sources isn’t a terribly relevant concern. In the customary vein of contemporary French fiction, this is more novella than novel. Andras intuits that not overstaying his welcome is his defining strength. Brevity enables the intoxicating story of Nguyên to rush directly into the bloodstream. At no point along the way is there an opportunity to stop and question if any of it really happened. The sublime spell sustains a hypnotic rhythm and momentum right to the end. Experiencing the sheer thrill of a skilled writer exercising considerable talents with absolute freedom, fused with the inspiring human portrait of a youthful Nguyên, is a formidable potion. This is an unforgettable and original book.

Faraway the Southern Sky concludes on a hopeful last thought. Change is an ongoing project. Even shouting in pain, alone and anguished, wherever you are–perhaps paradoxically sparked by an image of great and simple beauty—is a valid act of resistance that can transform the future, just as Nguyên believed:

 

It only takes a rose, said one day the man with the rubber sandals, the man of shore and shadows, the pariah whose head was held so high, for all that is arbitrary in the world to cry out in the prisoner’s heart.

Michael Londra writes poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays. His work has appeared or is upcoming in The Arts Fuse, The Fortnightly Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Restless Messengers, and spoKe, among others. He contributed the introduction and six essays to New Studies in Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer, forthcoming from MadHat Press. He lives in Manhattan.