lotesse | recent reading: LOTE by Shola Reinhold

I'm starting with LOTE in my recent reading catch-up because it struck a deep vein in me, in a way that was sharp and startling and affirmational.

This book is tremendously unique, but also nestles into traditions and histories where I feel at home. Reading it was an infusion of a different perspective, and a mirror held up to my own face. Reinhold's first novel, it strikes fresh notes with old tools.

There are two ways that reading this novel pierced me. The first, and more thematic and broad, is in its valuation and celebration of what it calls "fixations"; what I've been thinking of, since I read Elizabeth Freeman, as erotohistoriography, the desire to fuck the past, the life-defining erotic relationship of student to subject, reading to author. The main characters are people obsessed with historical figures, obscure artists and scene figures, and their lives are structured around these obsessions in a way that the book never mocks or minimizes. It's what these people are, and they're shown as elevated by the engagement.

Perhaps more narrowly, the particular fixations of this book are my own sort of fixation, Virginia Woolf contemporaries who are divinities of bohemian Modernism. Reinhold focuses on Black figures, part of a deep decolonialism, and also intersectionally shows the alliances between Black and queer modernist scenesters. The interaction with the past has strong historicity, often venturing into conreality academia with full faithfulness to academese and project politics.

And then there's the delightful, odd, detached, wandering characteristic of the narrative, the text of LOTE, itself. It takes so long to get a clear picture of what you're reading, where it's all going, but the vibes are crystalline and impeccable from page one. Frequently, the portrayals of cons, MBA types, and various normcore marks are hilarous. The heroine's co-fixationists are luminous. I haven't read the word "nacre" so many times in the same book, perhaps, ever. Utter aesthetic delight.

Strongly recommended if you've built your life around obscure texts or figures, especially old or grand or undervalued ones. One feels deeply seen. It feels important to practice your own worship, your private fandom, your transformative daydreaming. I wonder if Reinhold has an AO3.