Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile ed. by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears (review)

The chronological and international scope of this excellent book of essays is ambitious, gathering analyses of works by authors from across most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the globe. By choosing to center the volume on Paris, the editors offer what turns out to be an illusory focus in that the city functions only as a transitory point of passage, not a fixed place. For the authors discussed here, Paris is just as often a place to lose oneself as to find oneself. Many scholars have taken up the theme of exile in recent years, but this set of essays takes the reader a step further with the suggestion, made by several authors including Bernardo Toro in the interview that concludes this volume, that exile is the foundational state of all writing. Orlando and Pears have selected essays that complicate the notion of exile by expanding it to include self-exile, linguistic exile, and sexual exile among others. By not limiting exile to issues of nationality, race, or ethnicity, the editors consciously draw the reader's attention to questions of intersectionality. The editors broach this concern in the introduction, but the full impact of their choices only becomes clear as one reads the entire book, which contains essays on a diverse set of authors ranging from the more familiar like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, to lesser-known such as Elena Garro (Mexico) and Évelyne Trouillot (Haiti). One of the best essays is Alison Rice's complex study of the correspondence between Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar, two writers who resist interpretation and yet who yield fascinating insights on the question of what it means to be an outsider. Leslie Barnes's insightful analysis of Linda Lê's fiction is complemented by personal reflections on her own wanderings in Paris. Karl Ashoka Britto makes a compelling case for the inclusion of Vietnamese American authors Monique Truong and Aimee Phan, in his persuasive essay on Vietnamese diasporic fiction. Britto's essay draws connections between the French colonial and American postcolonial presence in Asia and subverts the reader's expectations of Vietnamese diasporic fiction. The volume concludes with two essays that allow the voices of writers to speak more directly either through summarized or transcribed interviews. The reflections of these two authors, Louis-Philippe Dalembert (Haiti), and Bernardo Toro (Chile), close the book in a manner that highlights its far-reaching conclusions about not only the literature of exile but also literature as exile.