This is not just a story about a man called Nguyễn, or a man called Andras who researched his movements in Paris in the years 1917-23, but a story about you, about your relation to revolutionary action, both past and present.
The average reader might be forgiven for not having the firmest grasp on the history of Hồ Chí Minh. In even the most cursory list of his biographical highlights, including leading the forces that would liberate French Indochina from an impressive array of successive colonial regimes (France, Japan, France again and, a few years after his death in 1969, the US) and founding the communist country known today as Vietnam, the geopolitical plot twists can be hard to follow. And that’s the half of Hồ’s life when he was famous. About the six years Hồ spent in Paris in the early 1920s—when he was in his early thirties—the historical record is particularly vague.
The uncertainties surrounding Hồ’s early life are emphasized rather than glossed over in Joseph Andras’s recent book, Faraway the Southern Sky, translated from the French by Simon Leser (Verso, 2024). Marketed as a novel (an accurate distinction, in that it is indeed something new) the book takes the form of a scholarly meta-narrative, a musing both historical and imaginative. Its most notable formal feature is the at-times-disorienting second person perspective: it recounts “your” journey through the streets of Paris seeking traces of your subject. While a sketch of Hồ’s time in Paris does materialize—the articles written, the congresses attended, the police agents evaded—the main action of Andras’s book consists of “your” meandering through the rues and avenues, your ruminations on history, insurrection, and the surveillance state.
Andras strives for historical specificity while simultaneously reveling in indeterminacy. The challenges to piecing together Hồ’s story begin with his name: Hồ Chí Minh may be the one we remember, but it is one of up to two hundred names that he used over the course of his life. During his Paris years he wrote under the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Nguyễn the Patriot, a collective pseudonym for his cadre of anticolonial organizers) and it is by this name that Andras refers to him (I will follow suit).
Nguyễn’s name is not the only aspect of his life that is hard to pin down. What year did he arrive in Paris? 1917, 1918, or 1919, depending on who you ask. Andras narrates his painstaking research, even as he downplays its significance: his bet is 1917, based on the testimony of a typesetter for the French Communist outlet L’Humanite who had known Nguyễn. While Andras ambivalently suggests that “maybe none of this is important” after all, his continued attention to the minutiae of Nguyễn’s movements suggests that there is meaning in the way his story gets told.
We know all too well that history is not an apolitical operation; narrating the politics of the past will necessarily describe a politics of the present. Andras’s savvy decision not to address the legacies of Hồ Chí Minh, for example, but rather the young Nguyễn Ái Quốc, makes a political claim. One effect of this decision is that the book limns a particularly inclusive leftist political vision. It not only emphasizes Nguyễn’s wide-ranging political sympathies, but also retroactively positions Nguyễn in coalition with multiple other movements, from the Paris Commune to the contemporary gilets jaune (Yellow Vests) protests. This coalition is broadened further by the inclusion of the reader, grammatically interpellated (“hey, you!”) by the text’s second person narration.
Andras’s use of the second person makes clear that this is not just a story about a man called Nguyễn, or a man called Andras who researched his movements in Paris in the years 1917-23, but a story about you, about your relation to revolutionary action, both past and present. When encountering a rare historical marker designating one of Nguyễn’s Paris abodes, you reflect on the wording of such memorials: “‘Here lies’ obstructs the imagination. ‘Here lived’ stimulates it.” The reader thus encounters the difference between a grave and a plaque, yes, but also a guiding metaphor for Andras’s mode of historiography. “Here lies” puts history to bed, whereas “here lived” opens the space for history as an imaginative project. And as Andras insists, this is a project that we are all participating in.
Andras writes of “History, boisterously capitalized” as a force in and of itself. In one particular street (in which you are unable to locate the exact location of one of Nguyễn’s former rooms), the layered histories of multiple ages “impose” themselves: the station where nine protesters were killed by the police “for wanting peace in Algeria” in 1962, a café targeted by terrorist attacks in 2015, and the site of barricades erected during the Commune of 1871. A single street becomes a palimpsest of violence and political action—both by and against the colonialist state.
More recent actions, such as the gilets jaunes protests, make frequent appearances in Andras’s narrative, adding layers to this palimpsest in real time. Admittedly, readers on the American left may have a hard time figuring out how to feel about the gilets jaunes movement. Its origins as a protest over fuel taxes and its composition largely of semi-rural whites obscure its core mission of economic justice, particularly for US observers. The protestors’ demands read like a page from the Global Justice or Occupy movements, calling for an end to homelessness, increased taxes on corporations, and increased public services, but their rural motorist aesthetic sometimes gives more MAGA than Black Bloc. In 2018, the first year of the protests, a New Yorker article suggested that the gilets jaunes, in an American context, would be Trump voters. Yet Andras, by mapping the actions of the gilets jaunes atop the movements of Nguyễn Ái Quốc a hundred years earlier, claims them instead for the revolutionary left, insisting on their belonging in the long insurrectionary tradition that includes the Paris Commune and Nguyễn’s revolutionary anticolonialism.
In addition to overlapping geographic space, these historical and contemporary movements share another throughline in the form of persistent state surveillance and repression. Andras indicts the modern surveillance state, even as he acknowledges that the records of Nguyễn’s near-constant surveillance provide the bulk of what we know about his activities during this time. (As several recent studies would attest, FBI surveillance reports also make serviceable, if controversial, primary sources.) In Nguyễn’s case, the French intelligence forces were nothing if not thorough: “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. Grocery shopping and visits to the cleaner’s, nothing was missed.” Additionally, two agents, “indigenes in the service of the Empire,” covertly befriended Nguyễn, pretending to be fellow activists.
Intense as it was, the state surveillance faced by the militant young anticolonialist was less than the average person encounters today. Andras writes, “Liberal democracies ended up establishing what no totalitarian regime could have ever put in place: files, updated daily, on every citizen. Paying for a purchase with a card, buying a train ticket, visiting a website, the daily restocking of social media accounts with data: isn’t progress exhilarating?” We are, of course, active participants in this exercise of state power. As Andras notes, “comfort rules better than the whip.” Nguyễn fought assiduously to thwart intelligence agencies in the early twentieth century. What does our acquiescence to quotidian surveillance say about the chances of the left in the early twenty-first century?
Nguyễn’s story is one of interconnected strains of global leftism: directly involved in anticolonial struggle in Indochina, he supported similar movements in South Asia, North Africa, and Ireland; wrote in support of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States; was a card-carrying Bolshevik who would spend time in the Soviet Union; and was a founding member of the French Communist Party. By layering Nguyễn’s already capacious anti-colonial solidarism atop contemporary movements such as the gilets jaunes, Faraway the Southern Sky both describes and models a coalitional antidote to narratives of leftist in-fighting, all the while hailing you, the reader, into this political vision. Andras, through his transhistorical approach, unique genre mashing, and experimental narration, charts a new brand of historiography that insists on the continuation of historical revolutions into the present moment.
Matthew Beeber received his PhD in English from Northwestern University in 2022. He lives in Chicago and writes on 20th-century left literary culture.