Paperback

English language

Published June 7, 2022 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:
9781478018728

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (2 reviews)

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead …

2 editions

resistance through aesthetics

5 stars

It's about being black and queer, it's about aesthetics and adornment as a kind of spirituality, it's about escape and creation/reinvention of oneself, it's about reclaiming history, it's weird and hard to describe.

Felt nearly perfect. The only thing I can find to fault is not having nearly enough descriptions of Mathilda's outfits. Mathilda must have a fabulous fashion sense and there's a part of me with a burning need to know what she is wearing at all times.

avatar for mouse@bookwyrm.social

rated it

5 stars