2020/79: LOTE --Shola von Reinhold

The classic counterpart traits of the Arcadian, like a fondness for old objects and buildings, and an inclination towards historicised figments, were, as far as I was concerned, much easier to inhabit for white people, who continued to cast and curate all the readymade, ready-to-hand visions. Being born in a body that’s apparently historically impermissible, however, only meant I was not as prone to those traps that lie in wait for Arcadians — the various and insidious forms of history-worship and past-lust. [loc. 178]

Lote, by (non-binary?) debut author Shola von Reinhold, is one of Jacaranda's #Twentyin2020 initiative -- publishing twenty books by black British writers this year. It's a stunning novel that sets a high bar: aesthetics, queerness, Blackness, alchemy, Modernism ...

Narrator Mathilde Adamarola is Black, working-class and gay. Devoted to Transfixions (sensual, almost hallucinatory obsessions with aesthetic icons such as Stephen Tennant, Josephine Baker, Jeanne Duval, the Marchesa Casati) and prone to Escapes (self-reinventions, rejections of one self's name, friends, social context), Mathilde discovers and is Transfixed by the queer Black Modernist Scottish poet Hermia Druitt (or Drumm), first seen in an old photograph where she is dressed as an angel, her hair 'an excruciation of coil and kink', not treated or straightened or tamed.

Determined to learn more about Hermia, Mathilde blags a place on an artistic residency in a small European town. The Residency is focussed on the work of Garreaux, and a branch of performance art known as Thought Art. It is wholly impenetrable, and antithetical to Mathilde's passionate interests. But Mathilde's encounter with Erskine-Lily, a local eccentric whose walls are adorned with images of Mathilde's Transfixions. Erskine-Lily introduces Mathilde to the Book of the Luxuries, a mystical Renaissance tract revived and reimagined by an interwar 'modernist cult' known as LOTE. (Think 'lotus eaters'.) LOTE, whose members include all of Mathilde's Transfixions, focussed on pleasure, adornment and luxury -- notions rejected by the heterosexual, white, Eurocentric establishment. But is there a connection between Garreaux and Hermia? And what will the irridescent tincture, brewed from an ancient recipe in true alchemical fashion by Erskine-Lily and Mathilde, reveal to them?

This is a lush, queer, exuberant novel, playfully interrogating decadence and modernism but also exploring the ways in which Black culture and Black art are suppressed and dismissed. Von Reinhold's prose is elaborate and amusing: Mathilde's narrative sometimes arch, often defiant. There are interesting undercurrents of genderqueerness, though here sexuality and queerness are wholly separable. And the historical (and ahistorical) interludes, Hermia's story and the stories of various Transfixions, are pitch-perfect.

I think I admired, rather than liked, Mathilde -- who is on one level a fraud and a con-artist, because that is the only register in which she can achieve her goals -- but I found myself seduced by, and pleasuraby drowned in, the prose and the plot of Lote: also angered at the erasure depicted therein, and vastly entertained by the impenetrable doublespeak of the Residency. Highly recommended, and full of joy and hope.