Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! On June 11, we’ll be exploring Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, a queer Lolita story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo, in translation from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson.
On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her 30s 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 events that arrange our experience of the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hanna Johansson is a Swedish writer and critic who writes on topics including art, literature, and queer issues. Antiquity, her debut novel, won the 2021 Katapultpris and was short-listed for the Borås Tidning Debutant Prize.