After a few days of annoyance and dread I decided that enough is enough and that I do not need to finish all the books on the list if I do not like them. Despite universal appraisal I could not connect with the narrator, the subject and I plunged head first into a reading slump. I expected to find new authors and narrative styles to love and I also expected that some books will not be what I like at all. When I decided to read the ROFC Prize Longlist I knew I was going into uncharted territory with my reading. It had to be one of the two from the longlist that I could not finish. Now winner of the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

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 her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. 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. 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.

Lote by shola von reinhold