Antiquity [electronic resource]

Hannah Johansson2024

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Summary

‘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.’ Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll, The Sydney Morning Herald 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...