Dates differ according to the memory of Andras’s various sources, but Hô arrived in Paris sometime between 1917 and 1919, and lived there until 1923. He embedded himself in a network of “Annamite” (as Vietnamese were often referred to during the colonial period) exiles who advocated for the liberation of Indochina and associated with French labor, socialist, and communist groups at least nominally sympathetic to independence. The conflicted or ambivalent reception he received from many of these groups is one of the factors that led Hô towards Marxism-Leninism. World War I had come to an end and France was responding to the physical and psychological damage of the war by gripping its imperial holdings with both hands. Hô’s objectives of Vietnamese national liberation and French decolonization were treated with suspicion and hostility, and he was constantly under police surveillance during his time in Paris. He lived a hand-to-mouth life and changed accommodation frequently. Hô joined a group known as the “Five Dragons” to draft a list of demands for Indochinese independence, and he attempted to present these demands to the Paris Conference at Versailles personally, where the terms of the end of the war were being hashed out by the leaders of the West. The demands, which were never given a hearing, were signed collectively under the pseudonym Nguyên Ai Quâc (Nguyên the Patriot); Hô would adopt, and be known by, this name for more than two decades.
“Nothing depraves like success.” This phrase opens Southern Sky, evoking a fatalistic political saintliness: winning, here, today, leads to too many impossible decisions, too many compromises. A revolutionary's victory is found in that messianic future, where they are held up as martyrs whose footsteps beat the path that leads to glory into the ground. That is not, however, Andras’s viewpoint, nor his interest in this little-known period in Hô’s life. Andras refuses to write about Hô’s penury as the incubation of a principled revolutionary; it is simply the condition that he lived at this time, like others before and after him. Resisting any sense of an historic destiny—it was, after all, impossible at the time for anybody to know if his revolution would come to anything—Andras frames this period of Hô’s life as fresh with possibility. “You try your hardest not to read this story topsy-turvy, that is, on the strength of an ending known to all . . . An effective narrative: from destitute to war chief, from nobody to stone-carved hero with a child in his arms. These rejections, these failures, you wish not to grasp in the light of his future victory, not to see these debacles as preludes to his consecration, as an unwound thread that no obstacle can sever.”
The hand-drawn map of Hô’s peregrinations through Paris, a series of curls and double-backs, shows the delicate hazard of his life. Starting from the 11th arrondissement in the east, Hô travels up through the northern reaches of the city between Montmartre and La Chappelle, then slowly down, south of the Seine, through the Latin Quarter and Place d’Italie. Andras follows Hô’s path through contemporary Paris, juxtaposing his travels with the author’s experiences of the gilets jaunes movement and France under the policies of Emmanuel Macron. Leser’s translation beautifully evokes a Paris that is both lively and obstinate, tough as much for Hô, the immigrant revolutionary, as for so many people today. Andras is following a ghost, but paradoxically feels himself more grounded as he does so: “it is History, boisterously capitalized, which imposes itself on you as you make your way.” The firmness of history is cast into relief by the writing itself, which can be enigmatic and even fleeting.
In a 2022 interview, Andras stated that he preferred the term “writer” to “novelist,” and “récit”—a genre associated with French literature in which narration is foregrounded as the primary site of action—to “novel.” (The English edition carries the latter word as a subtitle, whereas the French has the former.) Leser emphasizes Andras’s succinct, even brusque, prose, prose, occasionally giving the impression that the writer is eager to inscribe his sensations before they dissipate. Even more starkly, Southern Sky is written in the second-person (the French uses the familiar tu), with Andras the narrator scrutinizing Andras the writer, questioning his motives for writing. The move is at first confounding, but ultimately leads us to interrogate the text itself: What are Andras’s reasons for excavating this obscure period in Hô’s life? How wide is the gulf between experience and the written description? Where does the work sit between literature and history? Refusing the perhaps easier move of relating experience in the first- or third-person, the book is always talking back to itself, reflecting on what it might be alongside what it is.
This incongruous distancing of one’s self is reflected in the figure Andras seeks to understand. Hô was born in 1890 as Nguyên Sinh Cung, but that name has been effectively lost among the numerous pseudonyms he used. He was the son of a stridently nationalist father who refused to learn French (a requirement for any Vietnamese who wished to work in the colonial administration), but Hô immersed himself in the language and histories—he made constant overtures to the American Declaration of Independence and French Declaration of the Rights of Man—of the empires he opposed. One of the more striking juxtapositions that Andras ponders is the frequent association, in biographies and anecdotes, of Hô with Charlie Chaplin’s famous tramp: “In 1946, then newly elected president Hô Chi Minh revealed to a reporter, in front of a crowd gathered for his visit to the Champs-Élysée, that he thought it quite normal that everyone would want to see — in your translation—“a Vietnamese version of Charlie Chaplin.” And so the cold-blooded insurgent and the funny-looking fellow, leader despite himself brandishing the flag of Modern Times, have full leave to stroll, together, the very streets you’re walking on . . . ” As Andras follows Hô, he often finds himself following someone else.
Southern Sky strongly echoes the flâneur literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. “A walk is work for feet but even more for digression. Hints of ideas jump out only to end in puddles, sentences escape the hands of streets, words bounce off the cobblestones, memories start up without so much as announcing themselves. Walking, or writing with your eyes closed.” But what Andras presents is something of an anti-flâneurie. The classic flâneur cuts an aristocratic figure: leisurely, curious but not overly concerned, sufficiently insulated from the changing demands of modernity. This “classic” flâneur is typically a male member of the European middle- or upper-classes, freely wandering as his fancy takes him. Andras’s flâneur, however, is a colonial subject trying to understand the metropole that has his country in chains, driven across the city as much by poverty as by the police. Indeed, a large portion of Andras’s sources in tracking the whereabouts of Hô are a series of reports by the police officers assigned to follow him. We see, through Andras’s distance, a figure pushed and pulled not simply by external circumstances, but by a firm conviction entirely at odds with the detachment of the flâneur.
This is a difficult work to characterize. Readers of Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us might miss the unyielding drive of that earlier work. Instead, in Southern Sky, Andras simply offers his hand to guide us on a walk around Hô’s Paris: he likely lived here; he may have met some notable person there; a police informant had a conversation with him in that building. Andras studiously follows the clues and whispers of Hô’s beginnings as a revolutionary, but much is uncertain—not least Hô’s, and Vietnam’s, triumph over the French more than thirty years later. Though cast about by unfortunate circumstance and early failures, Hô hoisted his sail again and again in the belief that he would catch a gust of wind to carry him along. Like any good flâneur, he was a seeker of chances.
