FARAWAY THE SOUTHERN SKY

A racing, artfully embellished account of the man who became Hồ Chí Minh.

This frenetically fictionalized, wandering biography traces the elusive early life of the man called Nguyên Tât Thanh, then Van Ba (“his sobriquet as an odd-job man”), then Nguyên Ai Quâc (used by a patriotic collective), also “the soul of the Annamite movement” (after a French word used to refer to the Vietnamese), and, finally, Hồ Chí Minh. As the narrating flâneur hoofs a footpath through Paris in search of relics of his target’s past, he recounts Hồ Chí Minh’s own pursuit by government agents, opposing political figures, and radical leftist collaborators. Bursting with encyclopedic intelligence, the narrator retrieves data from a seemingly endless cache of dossiers, classified documents, newspaper headlines, aboveboard and backchannel communiques, Socialist and Anarchist treatises, and meeting minutes from the Second Congress of the Communist International. If the collagelike text produced from this vast archive occasionally yields less linguistically interesting sentences (“Former governor-general of French Indochina and future minister, in turn, of the Colonies, the Navy, the Interior and Education, Sarraut...”), Andras counterbalances these moments with genuinely arresting images, such as the decapitated head of a Vietnamese resistance fighter (“displayed in a market, flies and all for onlookers”), as well as poetic-sounding exchanges of bazin, plantains, and purple ink, and the striking depiction of a “fawn gray” city growling “while the gutter scoffs down water.” Surely, 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 Hồ Chí Minh borrows Marx’s Capital from a Parisian library and, rather than peruse and annotate its pages, “the big book served as his pillow.”

A buzzing, bustling, genre-blending book that balances fact and fiction, if unevenly distributed.