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The young man arrived in Paris, a refugee from political
repression, just as World War I was sputtering to a close. He came
with only a few coins in his pocket after sailing the world as a
lowly deckhand, still a painfully shy twentysomething who stammered
when he spoke in public. He moved into a dingy hotel on a
cul-de-sac in Montmartre, falling into a demimonde populated by
radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless and rebellious.
When, half a dozen years later, he stole out of town on a train
bound for the young Soviet Union, he had emerged as the fiery,
passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a
founder of the French Communist Party. In between had been years
living under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy
apartments, arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo
shops, revolutionary writing in the reading room of the
Bibliotheque Nationale, and meetings with Maurice Chevalier and
Colette, all while being dogged by French spies--much of what we
know about the young man's Paris years is thanks to near-total
police surveillance of him, down to accounts of arguments he had
with friends at home. Joseph Andras recalls Ho Chi Minh's early
years and walks Ho's Paris neighborhoods. Searching for traces of
the past in the streets of today, the author hears echoes of other
angry histories, from terror attacks to tent encampments of the
houseless to the protests of the Gilets jaunes. Ultimately this
slim, intensely lyrical, and genre-bending book becomes a
meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the the poor,
the free, the outcast, and the rebellious--people who may or may
not find a place in history books but without whom history could
not be written.
A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts
of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode
after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have
been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is
tortured, tried in a day and sentenced to death by guillotine. A
routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives
of more than a million Muslim Algerians. But what if the militant
is a "pied-noir"? What if his lover is a Jewish survivor of the
Holocaust? What happens to a "European" who chooses the side of
anti-colonialism? By turns lyrical, meditative, and
heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this debut novel by Joseph Andras,
based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in
France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being
acclaimed by Le Monde as "vibrantly lyrical and somber" and by the
journal La Croix as a "masterpiece".
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