Reviews

“Like Europeans in a Henry James, we would be creatures of genteel penury, full of education, artifice, a little vampiric, duping all the dull rich people around us. Except we were Black, except were poor, except we were basically self-taught (by their standards), except we were infinitely more subtle and fabulous…”

TITLE—LOTE

AUTHOR—Shola von Reinhold

PUBLISHED—2020

PUBLISHER—Jacaranda Books (UK)

GENRE—literary fiction

SETTING—UK & Europe, late 2010s-ish

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—taste—> interests—>Transfixions—>identity, systemic & systematic suppression of Black(/Queer) history/art/identity, Luxury (The Luxuries/A Luxury) & joy/pleasure, secret societies, art history & art museums, artists’ residency, Thought Art, the cult of western philosophies/ideologies/isms, etc., Lotus Eaters, androgyny, angels, Black trans experience, intersectional queer liberation, anti-colonialism & anti-capitalism, shoplifting, contrasting sociocultural regions in Europe, champagne & other gourmet delectables, friendships & alliances, trust, deception & betrayal, DIY-haute-couture fashion as queer identity expression, problematic faves, the nearly inconceivable complexities of human experience/history, a critique of what is considered to be “real” history/facts/evidence, Death, Escapes, secrets & past lives

Blurbs:

“In choosing to conjure Black voices through historical revisionism, rather than, say, Afrofuturism or pure fiction, the novel produces a new archive—a radical reference tool populated by real and imagined historical figures, Anons who have been festooned, fleshed-out, and freed from the rude imposition of marginality, anonymity and defacement.” — Izabella Scott

“Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE recruits literary innovation into the project of examining social marginalisation, queerness, class, Black Modernisms and archival absences. A critically important and hugely original debut.” — Isabel Waidner

“LOTE is a decadent celebration of portraiture, queer history and Blackness, and a bitingly funny work of fiction. In this book, von Reinhold provides us with a mischievous new work of aesthetic theory, as well as a glorious and gorgeously imagined fictional world. Ingenious; irresistible; a dazzling first novel.” — Naomi Booth

My thoughts:

This book was✨flawless.✨ I could almost feel my mind bending & expanding while reading it.

A past-less, luxury-forward MC on the hunt for her next Escape opportunity. An art-historian, activist mentor. Reluctant cohorts that turn into fierce friends. A pure-hearted, vulnerable confidante whose suffering will break your heart more than once & whose return will leave you in an absolute puddle of happysad tears.

The journeys of this colorful cast of characters take you from the art museums & private collections of London to an artists’ residency somewhere along the intersecting cultural borders of west-, north-, & eastern continental Europe; from the literature & art of queer & Black, misunderstood & suppressed creative individuals throughout western history, to the informal & secret societies of intellectual “elites” in whose midst western culture’s yt cisheteronormativity fights its soulless battle against the beauty & life-affirming perseverance of queer & Black existence.

I simultaneously wanted to inhale this book & savor every single word. I could have spent a thousand pages in von Reinhold’s world, in the company of Mathilda & Erskine-Lily & Hermia, just for ages & ages. I talk a lot about the philosophy of books being a big make or break for me & the philosophy of this one was *so* solid that I felt like my own world view was expanding & clarifying as I was reading it. Plus I learned a bunch of new words like “semaphore,” “monadically,” “orchidaceous,” & “oleaginous.” And the interlacing, fourth-dimensional layers of it all! The whole thing was just the epitome of my *ideal* reading experience, truly.

Really I cannot praise or recommend this book highly enough.

“Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush—probably not dissimilar to holy rapture—was an almost violent familiarity. The feeling of not only recognising, but of having been recognised. A new Transfixion.”

I would recommend this book to readers who love a beautiful, thought provoking, challenging read about Black & Queer identity/history/art, set in many-layered & vividly-realized European cities & towns, with a captivating amount of theory & intellectual musings, all filtered through a charming, highly relatable, vulnerable, compassionate, & *deeply* true-to-herself MC. This book is best read with a certain amount of focus & a glass of something sparkling to hand. 🍒🥂✨

Final note: I could definitely see myself rereading this one on the regular, like, *yearly.* Maybe multiple times a year… actually I might revisit this in September when I read dark academia. 😁

“‘Luxury-stained,’ said Erskine-Lily gravely on the bus back to Dun, ‘the pair of us.’
‘And none to start with.’
‘And none of it ours.’”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // houselessness, financial insecurity, racism & microaggressions, transphobia & transphobic violence (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: This book has excellent (& brilliantly subverted) dark academia vibes so whenever you’re feeling that genre, pick this one up. Although it would also be just the thing for those intoxicatingly warm Summer evenings… especially in firefly season, with a cheeky little glass of iced rosé champagne… 😙👌🏻

Music pairing: “Choreomania,” by Florence and the Machine

Further Reading—

Helen Oyeyemi
THE END OF MR Y by Scarlett Thomas—TBR
Also POPCO, THE SEED COLLECTORS, & OLIGARCHY by Scarlett Thomas
NO ONE DIES YET by Kobby Ben Ben (queer Black expression through art; intense literary writing style)
NO GODS NO MONSTERS by Cadwell Turnbull (secret societies, anarchist themes)
A BOOK OF SECRETS by Kate Morrison (historical fiction about a Black woman in Renaissance Europe)
ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf (mentioned in the novel, lots of similar themes)
CANE by Jean Toomer—TBR
THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt (LOTE feels in some parts like a critique/subversion of books like Tartt’s)
“Take Only What Belongs to You” in FRUITING BODIES by Kathryn Harlan
Alice Walker’s work on Zora Neale Hurston
BABEL by RF Kuang

Favorite Quotes—

(There may be some SPOILERS here ⤵️ so tread carefully… 👀)

Dedication: “Solidarity, love and adoration for all those resisting universal tedium; to all those struggling with fascism, racism and capitalism in any of their forms.”

“i. People rarely allow for Blackness and caprice (be it in dress or deportment) to coexist without the designation of Madness.

ii. People like to presume Madness over style whenever they have the chance”

“Behind the bar, in a garish gilt frame was a large mirror. It was more suited to the Folies Bergère than an old English members' club. We sipped our drinks and smoked our cigarettes as we wandered around the room—disdainful but loving it...”

“What in life could be more ecstatic an occupation than putting orchids in an ice-box and then taking them out again?”

“I hadn’t planned for cards at all but something visually more complex, involving star charts and tabulations, looking mystical and mathematical. Something diagnostic that would capture the essence of each figure, establishing intricate patterns between them, before at last identifying in a serious manner the source of my fixations. The result displayed none of the hoped-for rigour, resembling a teenager's overly embellished revision flash-cards. But they soon took on a devotional function, like prayer cards. Miniature icons.”

“Initially it was to do with reincarnation. …so many overlapping lives and just one soul. When this at last became insupportable… another gleaming narrative was constructed. In this one I belonged to some divine clan of being, a sort of celestial siblinghood…”

“I was allergic, in a word, to the architecture of my youth, which perpetually resurfaced, haunting me in ever more unnerving forms like this.”

“I couldn't remember where some of my really obscure Transfixions came from. They appeared following obsessive, whirlwind nights. I would emerge with a name or a face or even a full Transfixion card and would not always be able to find the source later. A book I could never relocate, a web page looked at on a library computer, search history gone the next day. I'd try and follow the thought chain that got me there. With some I even questioned if they were cusp-of-sleep confections, dredged up the next morning as truth. Were my Transfixions not, at least in part, vessels for something else? Did it matter if they had been real people?”

“Dizzying how it can fall with H.— the reception: either mirth or calamity dependent on something fickle, infinitesimal—the way the light hits her, and she in turn reacts, means princess or criminal, Josephine Baker or servant.”

“With each Escape, as I saw it, I was brought closer to my Transfixions, each vanishing act pulling me towards the unknown source of an ache first felt years ago…”

“We did not want to become people hollowed out by generations of too much bad labour into leaving other people's blood on the walls. Generation after generation of unused froth and frivolity would be finally uncorked in us!”

“The idea was that by disappearing from the inessential elements of one's own life, whatever they might be, you would inevitably be brought closer to the essential: a sublime self-subtraction.”

“The palace-bred insolence we cultivated came so naturally it could hardly be called cultivation.”

“Sometimes all I was able to do was lie back with my eyes shut, glutted with this knowledge, nerves intoxicated, and fall asleep. I would doze at regular intervals. These sleeps, Transfixion-sleeps, were quite frankly the equivalent of sunlit opiate-baths. Enveloping morphine-soaks in which I dreamt of all my Transfixions. They were the apotheosis of the sensations I experienced.

“…every time a white straight man chose to step out in such generic trappings he was upholding—creating—the conditions for every time a visibly queer Queer stepped out and got attacked.”

“…of all the people here, they were the most interesting. They were simultaneously angular and robust—like a couple of Gothic arches made flesh. The same dimensions used to calculate their limbs and faces. I felt the old pull to infiltrate...”

“Despite, or perhaps because of, my Transfixions I'd always been wary of artistic, biographical pilgrimages. Doomed for anti-climax but also fraudulent to the true lover of any personae. Much like expecting the living descendants of a poet you admire to exhibit a glimmer of the work, reduction to place or anything else material was cheapening, I thought. But I had just that morning read that, in 1909, after Edith Sitwell's grandmother piously incinerated the young poet's cherished Collected Swinburne, Edith arose vengefully at dawn, stole out of the house and boarded the paddle steamer from Bournemouth to the Isle of Wight where in the mist she presented a jug of milk, wreath of bay and comb of honey to the poet's tomb. I was immediately converted and it hit me standing there in Hermia's town.”

“It was often whilst researching one of my Transfixions that I came across another. Many of them had crossed paths. So much about them overlapped—queerness, a penchant for excess—that it made perfect sense they were connected in a more formal manner than I'd previously imagined.”

“Many Black Britons have escaped notice because historians have relied on clear references to race in documents as various as legal records, diary entries and business accounts, but we now know that race often goes unmentioned in all these sources. For example, Church annals pertaining to Sydney Black, a priest living in Oxfordshire in the 18th-century, detail his character and mention his wife, his children, his congregation. It was only through further records that we learn he was Black. From the Elizabethan period, all the way up to the 1950s, there are similar cases of the diaspora, indistinguishable on paper from the white Europeans they lived and worked amongst (at almost every level of society), being overlooked.”

“‘A lack of sleep leads to fascism, you know, Griselda.’ I decided it would be a good time to expound my theory: the sort of people who claim to require a few hours a night frequently happen to be morally bankrupt. This did not include people who couldn't get a decent number of hours sleep because of insomnia, work or children and so on, but rather people who claim not to need it and thus exhibit their own productiveness. These people included various right-wing politicians, dictators and numerous CEOs, regularly dubbed "The Sleepless Elite" by business magazines. Implicit in their claim is that everyone in the world ought to relinquish sleep if they want to escape hardship. That you are being indulgent. Perhaps their own lack of sleep causes this way of seeing: they are seriously sleep-deprived without realising they are, and after this long-term deprivation, their capacity for empathy has dwindled.”

“I knew she meant one thing—that I was Black. Black and thus I, more than so many others, more than her, should understand the problem with Beauty. With all assertions of the beautiful, but especially European ones which undermined my existence. Undermined the notion of me as beautiful. Framed art made by people that looked like me, throughout history, as something below art.”

“…history had buried many other potential Transfixions. I would still pass a building, and a particular curve in the stone would send me reeling with sensations and it could only be because the anonymous mason was a Transfixion, their life otherwise entirely unrecorded.”

“One day Malachi printed out a bell hooks essay for me thinking it of interest. It was. Too much so. I understood it to say Black queer and trans people, namely those depicted in Paris is Burning, worshiped at the throne of whiteness—the high fashion, the hyperfemininity: it was all about assimilating Beauty under Europatriarchy. …[but] between the 'assimilation' and the fantasy there was another space which was not about championing the thing that speaks against you—though that can be a literally fatal trap—but instead about showing your ability to embody the fantasy regardless, in spite of, to spite, and in doing so extrapolate the elegance, the fantasy, Romance, or whatever it was, abstract it and show it as a universal material, to be added to the toolbox. ‘Look! Look: it does not belong to them. Maybe we should not want it because they have weaponised it, but it was not theirs in the first place.’”

“Black people consuming and creating beauty of a certain kind is still one of the most transgressive things that can happen in the West, where virtually all consumption is orchestrated through universal atrocity.”

“I read about Nugent's participation in the early ballroom scene. Hermia had been to Harlem and the prospect of her attending one of these (according to contemporary press) "perverted social affairs" a.k.a. "Ye Fairies Ball" made the room fizz black as I read. I was rubicund and faceted. I emitted a pink sunburst. I was a living bronze five-pointed star.”

“To prolong this mood, and baptise it, I ordered more white wine, which tasted like holy water and river stones, and we became monumentally drunk.”

“Saint Christina… the Patron Saint of ‘lunatics’ and eccentrics… bywords. For Queer.”

“…an embodiment of the quaintrelle—often equated to the "female dandy", but more specifically a woman of extreme style who did more than follow or even lead in fashion. For both, attire was a serious socio-cultural modus operandi, shield and sword. Perhaps most importantly, it was a kind of material poetry. This was a time of heightened "frock consciousness," as Woolf would put it.”

“So Hermia interprets the prejudiced gaze of those she encounters—‘All quite unaware, I'm sure, but it is a face I have come to recognise everywhere—one sees the dull, goosefat glaze of eye. The universal pallor of bigotry’… She found herself overwhelmed by the prospect of receiving abuse in public.”

“More contemporary Black figures who can be said to have occupied the sphere of the Eccentric still tend to be allowed this role in limited fashions. We might think of Grace Jones, whose performativity and engagement with style situates her within both High Camp and avant-garde visions of eccentricity, but being Black, Jones has been presented equally as 'mad', as behaving and dressing as she does, as creating works as she does, due to being a Mad Black Woman. The truly transgressive often dislodges the appellation of eccentricity.”

“‘Why do you consider it more productive for me to sit up clutching a textbook thinking of nothing than lying down thinking of something?’”

“The very fact of Druitt being more believable as an invention than a real woman who lived a life is concerning. …the inclination of society to find it difficult to picture people of colour in Europe prior to the Windrush, even fantastical individuals like Hermia, is pernicious: it is not an uncommon tendency amongst historians to find the prospect of Black lives outside of familiar narratives implausible.”

“Documentation is regularly unorthodox or harder to come by when researching people of colour from this period, which speaks more about how society values certain lives than the veracity of their existence.”

“Finally, where the likes of Stephen Tennant and the Marchesa Casati are marginal figures in history, Hermia was a marginalised figure who also embraced outskirt cultures through leading an equally rarefied sort of existence—pursuing Life's marginalia.”

“‘Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ Virginia Woolf said. ‘And/or Black,’ Malachi said.”

“The prospect of Hermia being 'made up' had awoken me to the possibility of the opposite: that not only was Hermia real, considerable efforts had been made at blanching her from history; unmaking her.”

“The problem with our research was that neither of us had it in us to properly investigate Garreaux. It left us feeling nauseous. I recall Erskine-Lily saying to me wide eyed, ‘...the yellow book, it is a kind of curse. A hex; against us, and Hermia. That's what the Residency is... to keep them chanting the curse.’”

“‘But you know, I think I'd draw even more attention somehow if I went out dressed like them.’ Which was true—I had in fact tried this before myself and hadn't fooled anybody. People could tell somehow.”

“Testament to this: she had renounced certain aspects of Garreaux, admitting that, smuggled into his theory and inherent to Residency, was something oppressive. It's denial of identity, Garreaux's tacit blocking of anything femme.

‘The tectonic mascness of it all; that would have you think it neutral, as you once said.’

I could barely remember telling her this. Our old arguments had been multifarious, each feeling like life or death; I had worked through so many lines of attack and defence.”

“Making a Luxury appear before you was a sign of having conquered the grim imposition of reality.”

“…this unnatural, chemical friendship. It was an absurd blossoming.”

“‘You make it sound like there's a shadowy cabal specifically suppressing Black art in Europe.’

‘Mathilda, there doesn't need to be,’ she said. ‘There is enough in place to keep it out. But yes, there really are active racists who happen to work in galleries and museums, of course there are. I know you're not a dunderhead so don't be obtuse. I’ve met some of them, worked with some of them—if anything like your Hermia passed by them they would happily make sure it got lost, destroyed. Where do you think all this comes from?’ she waved at the cabinet. ‘Salvaged! And some of these racists know each other, of course they do. It's not a conspiracy theory, Mathilda…’”

“He lay there, every bit the sickly Victorian child. But convalescing, I thought. He had already acquired a nightgown and old breakfast tray somehow. ... I had to remember that Erskine-Lily really was ill, and this was perhaps his best and worst quality: to make the serious seem charming, to twist catastrophe into something delicious for us all to consume.”

“Erskine-Lily came home in a few days. Aloe vera and various unguents would have to be applied for over a week before the red faded.

‘Why not “she?”’

‘Hmm.’

‘They?’

‘I don't know.’

These terms flagged up too much, Erskine-Lily said, and made it unbearable. ‘he’ had been mentally ironed down to a film and meant nothing as long as it was said without meaning. A kind of self-legerdemain. In all the terms, in all the identities, there was nothing “to correspond”. Nothing that fulfilled a sense of it like the Alchemical Angel poster did. There wasn't a name for it. Not now anyway. There had been a name for it in the past. Maybe there would be one in the future. ‘And I can hardly go around calling myself an Alchemical Angel…’”

“Iridescence, he went on, is inherently Queer and always has been, well before rainbow flags.”

“She remembered purposiveness without purpose; the sensation of the beautiful.”

“Simply because I knew this old name, even if I didn't believe in its authority, its precedence, I would reflect it back, through time, from life before, I was helplessly treachcrous. This image of old self was death. All who contained it were deadly.”

Content Warnings

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Reviews

Lote by Shola von Reinhold

jellerie's review

ottinye's review

glass_chaim's review against another edition

editorbrenna's review

m7mdtonsy's review

ellarobinson's review

kendra_kendra's review against another edition

imrereads's review

jem_carstairs's review

ceallaighsbooks's review