Starred review from March 18, 2024
In this eloquent and impassioned novella, Andras (Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us) charts a course through contemporary Paris in the footsteps of Vietnamese leader Hô Chí Minh, who lived in the French capital in the 1910s and ’20s, and reflects on the nature of revolutionary movements. Andras affectionately and romantically describes Hô as a “moneyless vagabond” who “changed names like he changed shirts, sweating in the hope, no less, of making us all equal at last.” Under the name Nguyên Tât Thanh, he left his home in the French protectorate of Annam and joined a socialist organization in Paris. As he began writing about Indochina for socialist and communist publications, he quickly gained the attention of his comrades—as well as of the French police, who began to surveil his every move. While visiting sites where Nguyên lived and worked, Andras renders the city’s daily rhythms (“A restaurant sign flickers; wheels toing and froing; the city growls, fawn gray, while the gutter scoffs down water”) and reflects on the ways in which revolutionary idealism is often marred by violence (“Nothing casts a shadow over you quite like fratricidal blood”). Along the way, his flâneur’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.
April 15, 2024
A racing, artfully embellished account of the man who became Hồ Ch� Minh. This frenetically fictionalized, wandering biography traces the elusive early life of the man called Nguy�n T�t Thanh, then Van Ba ("his sobriquet as an odd-job man"), then Nguy�n Ai Qu�c (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 Ch� Minh. As the narrating fl�neur hoofs a footpath through Paris in search of relics of his target's past, he recounts Hồ Ch� 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 Ch� 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.
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