Red Threads: a ‘Left-Melancholic’ Walk Through Paris in Joseph Andras’s <i>Au loin le ciel du sud</i> (2021)

Since 2016, Joseph Andras has published a suite of lyrically dense, formally meticulous, literary-political experiments. In his Au loin le ciel du sud (2021), he focuses on Hô Chi Minh, a man who lived long enough to become a chief of state, having thwarted first the French and then the United States. This article argues that by using Hô Chi Minh as its guiding star, Au loin le ciel du sud takes its readers on a ‘left melancholic’ tour of Paris, one whose particular epistemological posture stirs to life sedimented layers of radical social history at each stop, and in doing so, begins to cultivate a reading subject who in turn becomes their living repository. As I will demonstrate, the formal strategies that enable such a literary project rise into focus when compared with another generic tradition, the post-1968 variant of the French detective novel, the néo-polar. In the terms considered by this special issue, the formal resemblance between Au loin le ciel du sud and the néo-polar links Andras’s book to a longer literary tradition of social critique, and the history of the ‘social novel’ more generally.