Luxury & Modernism

I finished reading Shola von Reinhold’s modernist opus LOTE on my third try. Its glamorous quasi-protagonist, Mathilda, begins an intra-continental hunt through British modernist art archives after encountering a mysterious portrait of a luminous Black artist, Hermia Druitt, once a poet and socialite. Von Reinhold’s opulent five-hundred page debut novel splices together narration from Mathilda’s present day journals, Hermia’s baroque dreams, and fictional academic texts. LOTE is at times difficult read, but it’s as bracing as it is frustrating — each time I tackled it, fresh ideas emerged about archival memorials, institutional memory, and the social life of art. —Jahnavi Mehta