LOTE

Shola von Reinhold
Jacaranda Press

Evoking Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending Orlando, the narrator of Shola von Reinhold’s debut novel has shed names throughout her life. We find her as Mathilda at the start of LOTE, volunteering at a prestigious art gallery. Black, queer and working class, Mathilda is forced to contend with micro (and macro) aggressions while navigating the hostile art world. While clearing through boxes at work, she discovers the photograph of a forgotten poet and bohemian, Hermia Druitt, known during her time as the ‘Black Princess,’ an acquaintance of the Bright Young Things. An obsession begins. 

After losing her volunteer position and temporary home, Mathilda applies for an artist residency in Dun, a vaguely European town, not so much interested in the programme but the accompanying grant which will keep her afloat for a few more months. There’s also a connection to Hermia—the poet once lived in Dun. 

Von Reinhold revels in parodying the pretentiousness of the contemporary art world through Mathilda’s residency as she fakes her way through lofty seminars, lectures full of nothing but buzzwords and absurd assignments. Her love for decadence and camp clashes with the residency’s devotion to a minimalist aesthetic and much of the novel’s humour comes in the encounters with Mathilda’s residency peers—‘woebegone drips’ trapped in 2007—and their self-aggrandising approach to art. Mathilda finds a kindred spirit in Erskine-Lily, the local flamboyant socialite, who shares a similar obsession with Hermia and her lifestyle. They drink, scam and begin a scavenger hunt for clues to Hermia’s existence through her involvement with a local society of bohemian occultists named LOTE.

Mathilda’s devotion to a modernist aesthetic is embodied in the novel’s writing. Rich, lush language is our guide on the search for Hermia but there’s a self-aware wit to writing in this style and the line between worshipping and ridiculing hedonism is carefully walked. Mathilda and her author are all too aware that a Black, queer, working-class woman would not have been embraced by her icons—which is why the existence of Hermia is so alluring. LOTE summons the spirit of modernism to both cherish and critique it, a type of cognitive dissonance people of colour often have to contend with when looking to the past.

LOTE is a queer fantasy and its polemic playfulness opens up a dialogue with both real and imagined history. The novel’s devotion to ornate language occasionally sways into opaqueness, but it has enough bite to pull it off. By refusing to look at the past as we’re taught it, LOTE is a proud and sublime assertion of Black, queer history. 

—Katie Goh