Antiquities
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'A writer innately drawn to paradox, and to the moral questions inherent in the relationships between richness and poverty, mind and body, history and imagination' Ali Smith
'As cunning and rich as anything Ozick's written' Wall Street Journal
'One of our era's central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are' The New Yorker
'Ozick's prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave' New York Review of Books
I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing.
In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil.
In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.
A W&N Essential
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ozick (Foreign Bodies) delivers a beguiling novel of a man living in the past. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a retired lawyer estranged from his friends and his only son, has returned to live at the Temple Academy, the boarding school he attended as a child, which has been converted into a makeshift retirement home for its trustees. There, with his beloved Remington typewriter, he labors over his memoirs. His account revolves around two axes: his childhood fascination with the archaeological adventures in Egypt of his distant cousin Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, which Lloyd's father impulsively joined, and a school-age infatuation with a mysterious classmate, Ben-Zion Elefantin, who claimed to be from Egypt. Ozick is adept at capturing the vicissitudes of fading memory or flashes of lucid insight, and she unspools the story at a brisk pace. While Petrie's lively venom and wit are sometimes overdone by Ozick's overwrought efforts to develop his private-school mannerisms (Ben-Zion Elefantin has a "farcical pachyderm name"; Temple retains "Oxonian genuflections"), the novel becomes a fascinating portrait of isolation, memory, and loss as Petrie's health and the state of Temple become more perilous. While it doesn't reach the heights of her greatest work, this is impressive nonetheless.
