![]() Adamarola’s is a history that dresses up and drinks foamy pink champagne. They are ornamented and lavish, drunken and shiningly brilliant. These figures are high camp, daringly queer and gender fluid. She instead falls into lucid dreams – ‘the equivalent of sunlit opiate-baths’ – about a group she calls her ‘Transfixions’. Adamarola is unmoved by histories that don’t include her, in which she cannot find herself. At the archive, Adamarola claims that she is working on a book about the 1920s aesthete and socialite Stephen Tennant and the Bright Young Things, but her private fascinations are much more tremendous: she distinguishes herself from those who simply worship, recast and curate the past – a privilege not afforded to her easily, being that she is Black, working-class and of ‘a body that’s apparently historically impermissible’. Mathilda Adamarola, the protagonist, has arrived for her first day volunteering at an archive and ‘an incensed blond twink’ is looking at her outfit of ‘eBay lab diamonds, silver leatherette and lead velvets’ with great disdain. ‘People like to presume madness over style whenever they have the chance,’ begins Lote, the extraordinary debut novel by Glasgow-based Shola von Reinhold, published by Jacarada in March. ![]() ![]() ![]() Courtesy: the writer photograph: Georgie Carr ![]()
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