Antiquity
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson—a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo
On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her thirties upends the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Lust and admiration for Helena, a chic older artist, brings Antiquity’s unnamed narrator to Ermoupoli, where Helena’s daughter, Olga, seems at first like an obstacle and a nuisance. But the unpredictable forces of ego and desire take over, leading our narrator down a more dangerous path, and causing the roles of lover and beloved, child and adult, stranger and intimate to become distorted. As the months go by, the fragile web connecting the three women nears rupture, and the ominous consequences of their entanglement loom just beyond a summer that must end.
With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, beauty, morality, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johansson debuts with a moody exploration of loneliness and obsession against the backdrop of an arrestingly beautiful Greek island. The unnamed 30-something narrator accepts an invitation from Helena, an artist whom she recently interviewed and has become fixated upon, to visit Helena's house on Syros. There, the narrator is distraught to learn that Helena's teenage daughter, Olga, will be joining them, interrupting what she had hoped would be an opportunity to get closer to Helen. Of Olga, the narrator thinks, "I hated the name before I met her; I hated it only when I knew her by name, when all I knew was what Helena had told me about her." The name itself gives the narrator a "strange and inexplicable sense of being left out." After Olga arrives on the island and Helena's interest in the narrator begins to wane, she turns her eye instead to Olga, inserting herself between the mother and daughter and shifting her allegiances as she develops a Lolita-like erotic interest in the girl. While Johansson's sentences are lovely and her observations are sharp and clear-eyed, the novel's stakes never rise high enough to capture the reader's attention. What might have been a visceral narrative of desire and harm remains a quiet meditation.
