Antiquity

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.

Antiquity follows its unnamed narrator, a lonely woman in her thirties who becomes enamoured of a chic older artist, Helena, after interviewing her for a magazine. Helena invites the narrator to join her in the Greek city of Ermoupoli where she summers with her teenage daughter Olga. At first an object of jealousy, Olga morphs into an object of desire as the pull of Helena is transposed onto her daughter and the prospect of becoming someone's first, if perverse, lover.

With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, The Lover, and Lolita, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, power, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.

Review:

'Elegantly translated ... [Antiquity] sets up a literary conversation with works such as Death in Venice and Nabokov's Lolita. Like those novels, plot is secondary to the meticulous creation of a predator's interior landscape. And the narrator of Antiquity is as compelling a problem as Humbert Humbert or Aschenbach - as with them, power and responsibility are inverted and sublimated into diaphanous aesthetics, confronting the reader with pointed questions about the nature of beauty, and of art's power to do harm.'

'While beautifully sensuous and unflinching in its depiction of all-consuming love, rarely has desire been painted with such dark desperation ... Johansson's voice is extraordinary and uniquely her own.'

'Hanna Johansson writes with astonishing precision ... her ability to articulate feeling and sensation, both mental and physical, is unmatched. ... [Antiquity] takes you slowly through a summer, and, despite yourself, you will let your feet drag and fix your eyes on the fascinatingly terrible thing in front of you.'

'Entrancing and calamitous, Antiquity dreams deeply into the shadows of desire and obsession. A precise and mysterious spell of a book.'

'In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson probes the most forbidden recesses of desire, ageing, and memory in sentences as lucent and incisive as shards of glass. Wily, mesmeric, and utterly disarming, this fabulously translated novel held me captive from the very first page, and its questions and images will linger in my blood for a long time. Rarely have I felt so transported and beguiled by a book, let alone a debut. Don't miss it.'

'A wonderful novel written with the menacing elegance of a cat burglar working in the shadows and at great heights.'

'Antiquity could have been a different, equally impressive novel, exploring its territories - queer familial and erotic longing, projection, the spectral lines of transgression - in the protective gear its sharp observations, meticulous intelligence, and gorgeous sentences would provide. Instead, what Hanna Johansson offers in her electric, unsettling debut refuses all protection and dares the reader to do the same. Kira Josefsson's translation is its own marvel, the language brimming with just-kept chaos until the keeping's no longer possible, the feeling's just too big. I won't forget this book or its aftermath: a confusion, a consternation, an explanation that is not an explanation, a story open at both ends.'

Prizes: Joint winner of The Catapult Prize for best Swedish fiction debut 2021 (Sweden). Short-listed for The Boras Daily Newspaper Debut Award 2021 (Sweden).