Overview

The young man arrived in Paris, a refugee from political repression, just as World War I was raging to a close. He came with just a few coins in his pocket, a painfully shy twentysomething who stammered when he spoke in public, though he had sailed the world as a lowly deckhand. 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 the same Paris neighborhoods today. 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.

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9781804291719

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Reviews

Praise for Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us -- : Electrifying * New York Times * Intense * Sunday Times * Powerful * Spectator *

In this eloquent and impassioned novella, Andras charts a course through contemporary Paris in the footsteps of Vietnamese leader Hô Chí Minh ... 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. -- Starred Review * Publishers Weekly * A buzzing, bustling, genre-blending book that balances fact and fiction ... 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 H? 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.' * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Information

Joseph Andras is the author of the novels Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, Ainsi nous leur faisons la guerre, and Au loin le ciel du Sud. Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us was adapted for the cinema (as Faithful) by Hélier Cisterne and was awarded the Prix Goncourt for First Novel. But Andras refused the prize, explaining his belief that “competition and rivalry were foreign to writing and creation”. He lives in Le Havre.

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