Lost and Found Voices: Four Gay Male Writers in Exile by Luc Beaudoin (review)

Reviewed by: Lost and Found Voices: Four Gay Male Writers in Exile by Luc Beaudoin Connor Doak Lost and Found Voices: Four Gay Male Writers in Exile. By Luc Beaudoin. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2022. x+ 252 pp. can $95. ISBN 978–0–2280–138–7. Luc Beaudoin's excellent study explores four queer writers whose lives and work spanned multiple countries, cultures, and languages: Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969; Poland, Argentina, France), Valerii Pereleshin (1913–1992; Russia, China, Brazil), Abdellah Taïa (b. 1973; Morocco, France), and Slava Mogutin (b. 1974; Soviet Union, United States). All these writers lived in 'exile' from their home country and—to some degree—from their first language, and Beaudoin considers the intersection between sexual, national, and linguistic identities. The author makes clear his personal stake from the outset, announcing his positionality as a 'queer reader' who 'interpret[s] [these texts] from [his own] experiences' (p. 13). Beaudoin shares how the threads of linguistic and sexual self-discovery have intertwined in his own life: while the language of his childhood home was French, he writes that '[his] gayness is Anglophone' (p. 6) and calls himself 'a gay man effaced from my own native language' (p. 8). While this personal voice is strongest in the Introduction, he occasionally returns to first-person anecdotes and observations throughout the volume. The book contains four principal chapters, one for each author. While Pereleshin, Taïa, and Mogutin were/are open about their sexuality, Gombrowicz's has been the subject of much speculation. Beaudoin makes no bones about it: Gombrowicz 'was queer all his life and in all of his writing' (p. 17). He defends this view not only through his analysis of Kronos, Gombrowicz's intimate diary (published only in 2013) that reveals the extent of the author's encounters with men, but also through a sophisticated unpacking of the writer's experiments with form throughout his œuvre, which both express and evade his queerness. While the relationship between sexuality and form is central to Beaudoin's analysis of Gombrowicz, the nexus between sexuality and language comes into focus in his Pereleshin chapter (Chapter 2). Beaudoin argues that Pereleshin 'became openly gay in Portuguese', with the new language offering a 'liberation' for the poet (p. 82). The comparative analysis of Pereleshin's Lusophone and Russophone poetry makes compelling [End Page 138] reading, especially the discussion of the two versions of the poem 'The Cannibal' (p. 90) in Russian and Portuguese. Beaudoin's third chapter examines how Taïa, the Moroccan–French novelist and film-maker, negotiates his identities as a gay man and an Arab in Paris, 'refram[ing] his homosexuality and queer desire in a fluid transcultural, translinguistic, and almost transphysical manner' (p. 118). Once again, Taïa's artistic work proves inextricably linked to his biography, and Beaudoin astutely maps how Taïa positions himself in relation to the metropole and to the Morocco he has left behind, particularly his troubled relationship with his mother. Chapter 4 will be more familiar to Slavists, as Beaudoin turns to the provocative writer and artist Mogutin. Beaudoin builds on previous work by Vitaly Chernetsky in discussing Mogutin's hypermasculine aesthetic and his critique of consumer capitalism, but treads new ground in identifying a 'softer form' (p. 174) in Mogutin's aesthetics from 2017 onwards. Overall, this is an insightful study that is strengthened by the author's personal reflections. The book could have been more explicitly comparative, especially in the Conclusion, which ostensibly unites the preceding four chapters under the umbrella of translation but actually, for the most part, treats each writer in a separate subsection. The style is engaging if sometimes unorthodox: the occasionally offeat and grammatically unconventional English is perhaps fitting for a book that challenges the strictures of language and how one articulates one's identity. The volume proves particularly timely in today's political moment, when a new wave of LGBTQ+ refugees are fleeing a Russia that has redoubled its anti-gay stance. Connor Doak University of Bristol Copyright © 2024 Modern Humanities Research Association

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