an intriguing and provocative exploration of desire and obsession, the unnamed narrator's infatuation with the chic artist Helena and the subsequent shift in her feelings toward Helena’s daughter, Olga, creates a complex and unsettling dynamic that keeps readers engaged.. However, the story sometimes feels disjointed, leaving certain emotional threads underexplored. it's a thought-provoking read that invites reflection, though it might not fully resonate with everyone.

This was an interesting read about a family dynamic between a daughter, mother and the mother’s best friend. I didn’t find it as propulsive as I wanted to and thought it was quite a slow book. I appreciated that you had a lot of time to get to know the characters and I thought that the setting was great and really lent itself to the feelings of isolation, but I kept waiting for the main plot to happen and it just didn’t seem to begin. I feel as though the blurb mis markets this slightly. I did think this was a good book perhaps just the plot wasn’t all there for me.

This was a very interesting read! I read it in a day, although the subject matter makes it difficult to give it a rating!
This is a book I'll be thinking about for a long time.

Antiquity is a story of Obsession across the ages. I think it has the obvious comparisons with Lolita but in the same way that Nabokov has been compared as a metaphor towards capitalism I think that Antiquity is an extended metaphor for the female obsession with bodies and ageing. The narrator begins by being obsessed with owning the mother before becoming enthralled with the daughter and I think the setting of Greece only reinforces these ideas of reincarnation through possession.

While being set in a hot Mediterranean country, I would still say that this felt like a northern novel. The narrator was cold and dispassionate and there was the continual dislocation from the world around her that all female narrators seem to struggle with in literary fiction at the moment. It's perhaps necessary here to hold a woman having a romantic obsession with a teenager at arms length. It's well, if rather clinically written but it's definitely not a sultry summer read. It's a much darker grappling with desire and the boundaries with possession but no less interesting for it.

Despite reading this in Ermoupoli - swimming in the same sea, going to the same cafes, and undoubtedly taking a similar photo from the balcony – this book felt quite distant. With a narrator who prides herself on understanding others without revealing herself, this detachment may be inevitable, but I had hoped that throughout the book she would be revealed in these depictions of others. As her abuse of Olga deepens, she does reach back into her own childhood, observing Olga’s nascent sexuality with an unreliable, over-familiar eye, but, for the most part, the pages slid by without much development. Maybe I need to reread it when I’m longing for that gentle summer pace.

a very weird, punchy, dreamy kind of book. really did enjoy it and it's slippery, tight prose, but felt like there was so much more to be explored.

Thanks to the publisher for my free digital ARC of Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson. I’ll generally request most books based on vibes on Netgalley, and if they’re translated or queer literary fiction I’ll almost definitely request it. So when I saw this one was literary, queer AND translated, I immediately pressed request. Perhaps I should have paid more heed to the blurb likening this to a queer Lolita retelling. Next time an author has an idea for any type of Lolita retelling, I’m going to need them to just put that idea in a little box in the back of their mind and lock it up 🙂

I’m being a bit dramatic - Antiquity is not as grotesque as Lolita, but the fact remains it is a story of a grown woman embarking on an affair with a 15 year old. The blurb describes it as perverse and there’s no condoning of the behaviour but I just… it felt unnecessary.

Icky subject matter aside, the writing also felt cold. It felt objectively beautiful, but it was lacking a soul. I felt disconnected from the beginning and I only really persevered because it was short.

Other reviewers seem to have had a better time with this one, so definitely check out their reviews too for a more balanced opinion.

this is a novel that is essentially told in two parts. both of which boil down to our narrator grappling with feelings of loneliness and obsession.

told over the course of one summer, our narrator is invited to join helena and her teen daughter olga on a greek island. we come to find that she hasn’t known helena too long, their friendship having sparked from an interview she conducted, though she has felt a pull to get close to helena— to be needed, be wanted, be known.

“I was looking for someone who could reflect me back to myself. I was looking for someone who could bring me into their world. I wanted to obliterate myself, be emptied and filled, but I never found what I was looking for.”

battling with helena’s inconsistent moods, her eyes eventually find a new person to latch on to, to fawn over and help curb the ever present feelings of loneliness. helena’s daughter, olga.

while their relationship is a predatory one, the details of their coupling are kept relatively vague. the author tells enough so that you know exactly how far our narrator takes things, but there are no gratuitous details.

our narrator wants nothing more than to be loved, to be needed, to be wanted. she is greedy for the attention of others and enjoys being proven right, to have a sense of power over someone else.

“Had I done anything wrong? No. All I wanted was to be loved. And she had loved me, I thought, she had loved me like nobody else would be able to love me.”

while i didn’t end up loving this, i thought it read very well and i made a note of so many beautiful quotes and passages. i encourage readers to pick this one up once it releases on the 18th july here in the uk.

thank you to scribe uk and netgalley for allowing me to read an advance copy.

Despite the subject matter, this book was beautifully written and full of loneliness with a dreamlike quality. I really enjoy a book without any real plot and this was done so well, floating through this hot vacation town, sticky with fruit, dripping with sea water, and no real or authentic connections being made. There was a lot of character building layered with obsession and hyperfixation from our main character, who shifts her obsession from mother to daughter in the face of rejection.

Hanna Johansson’s prize-winning debut is an unsettling tale of queer obsession, desire and self-delusion. The unnamed narrator’s a Stockholm-based journalist who tends to live vicariously through the people whose lives she envies. Her latest attachment is to Helena, an older artist she once interviewed. The narrator gradually inserts herself into Helena’s life, mirroring her tastes and habits, observing her almost as if she were an artwork. Her attention to Helena pays off when Helena invites her to stay at her holiday home in Greece. But the narrator’s wary about this invitation as Helena’s there with her 15-year-old daughter Olga, who occupies the position in Helena’s affection the narrator craves for herself. But once there the narrator slowly begins a sexual relationship with Olga, one that becomes all-consuming.

The outlines for the novel centre on the ‘Lolita-like’ aspects of the affair between the narrator and Olga but the novel itself is more akin to an extended character study. It’s a dream-like, painterly piece with a strong emphasis on atmosphere – Johansson is consciously building on her background as an art critic. Her prose is fluid, elegant even, and it’s easy to see why she’s been compared to writers like Marguerite Duras, although there’s also a hint of Violette LeDuc here, as well as various cinematic influences – and copious references to queer literature and film. Her style reminded me too of more recent novels like Winter in Sokcho.The timeline is as restless as the narrator, shifting between past and present; and the descriptive passages often project a kind of languid beauty.

The narrator’s a fascinating creation. She sees herself as a perennial outsider, only able to fulfil her desires through parasitic, precarious forms of bonding. As if she’s a spy of sorts briefly granted access to others’ experiences yet exempt from any form of responsibility for her interactions. It’s this sense of detachment and self-deception that allows her to overlook issues such as relations of power between her and Olga. The roots of the narrator’s perspective are obscured, although it’s clear she’s estranged from her own family, and has few, if any, close friends. So, in many ways this is also a study of the impact of extreme isolation and loneliness which makes this far from a standard morality tale.

The narrator simply transfers her interest in Helena to Olga, and justifies this on the basis that she and Olga are somehow alike – although it’s also possible that this transference is an act of revenge in the face of Helena’s seeming indifference. Johansson sometimes frames the narrator’s actions in terms of the mythic, so that the narrator becomes someone outside of the real, with Olga at one stage becoming a version of Persephone abducted by the king of the underworld, leaving her mother to grieve. This mythic element feeds into the narrator’s tendency to mythologise her own impulses and decisions, elevating them above the mundane – such as mere sexual attraction. Although it’s also suggested that Olga is actually, in many ways similar, rebellious, unhappy at school, and struggling with coming to terms with being queer.

At various points in the narrative, the narrator and Olga appear to mirror or reflect aspects of each other’s character. So that the narrator’s attraction to Olga might be seen as part of a process of the narrator coming to terms with herself. But the narrator’s a quintessentially unreliable one, so the lines between her understanding, her version of events, and what’s actually happening are deliberately obscured. However, this is part of what makes this such a fascinating novel, don’t all of us seek to justify our actions through the stories we weave about ourselves and those around us? In that sense the narrator’s not particularly unusual except in her combination of exceptional self-consciousness and equally exceptional obliviousness to the possibility that her choices impact others, in likely damaging ways. All of which makes it possible for her to cross cultural and moral boundaries in ways many others wouldn’t even contemplate. Translated by Kira Josefsson.

Antiquity has a nebulous, hazy quality to its narrative. I was expecting something more explicit, and while I was relieved it was not so, the inferred sexual intimacy between the lead character and the 15-year-old object of her desire, Olga, was no less comfortable reading.

The Greek island setting is vividly captured, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the dilapidated houses and gardens.

I found the lead character stunningly lacking in self-awareness. I suppose I expected even fleeting evidence of moral dilemma when pursuing Olga, but there was none. I don't feel I ever truly understood the lead character's motivations - I wondered if she maybe saw Olga as 'the next best thing' to her mother, Helena, who she had previously obsessed over.

The writing is of that dreamy, hallucinogenic style that doesn't always work for me - I would have liked something more concrete to underpin the sense of the unreal - and makes good use of the landscape of sun, heat, sea and a general sense of loosened boundaries.

Antiquity is a queer Lolita story, following an unnamed narrator in her mid thirties as she becomes obsessed with Olga, aged fifteen the daughter of an older artist named Helena. The story takes place on the Greek Island of Ermoupoli, where the narrator joins Helena.

The devolution of the narrator as she looses herself to her obsession and becomes all consumed by her insecurities. The narrator is self deprecating from the start by as the story moves along her sense of self worth is completely obliterated.

The writing is lovely and there are quotes that I found myself reflecting on. The later of the novel was a hard and uncomfortable read so I do warn you before reading.

"Time wasn't logical. A span of time that felt, back then, in the beginning, like several weeks, was in fact just a few days. A span of time that felt, later, like a few days or even less, only a few brief moments, was in fact unfolding for much longer than that, enormous expanses of time that I greedily swallowed and demanded more of, which I couldn't get enough of, which I didn't want to end, which I wanted to stretch and become forever."

Antiquity has been compared to a female Call Me By Your Name and Lolita, therefore the themes can be divisive so be mindful of that before reading. The behaviour is not condoned or promoted.

Thank you to Johansson, Scribe UK and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. #Antiquity

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review!

3 stars!

This was one heck of a read. I knew what I was getting into and the book isn't explicit in ways that some would think with the context of the story but the narrator has such entitlement, almost, because she's lonely she comes across as an almost spoilt ignored child herself as she is very obsessive over artist turned friend, Helena.

Then, her obsession turns to her 15 year old daughter Olga. The narrator at one point sees that she did nothing wrong when looking back on their relationship and how she was with Olga as, she gave her love and also a story to tell someone who loved her when she's older. Unhinged and a well written character becaude I just couldn't stand her and she didn't see any flaws or wrongdoings on what went on.

This reads to me like a reception of the Proserpina myth - but where things are given a twist so that the female narrator is the Pluto figure. It's subtly done but the clues are there from the title 'Antiquity', the Greek island setting, the chapters with their mythic headings (Atlas, Echo etc.), the prevalence of pomegranates and the way the narrator disrupts the mother-daughter relationship of Helena and Olga.

It's a interesting project that is as much about the narrator giving a shape to her obsession and desires as a realist retelling. But thinking about the mythic precedent adds nuance and complexity: Olga is 15 and at one point the narrator notices her blood-stained sheets - a sort of stand-in for Pluto's rape but this time without the gender dichotomy. It's striking, too, that where the myth as retold in Ovid's [book:Metamorphoses|1715] is as much about the frantic search of Ceres for her daughter, here Helena is a more lax mother, seemingly oblivious to what is happening in her home.

The writing is of that dreamy, hallucinogenic style that doesn't always work for me - I would have liked something more concrete to underpin the sense of the unreal - and makes good use of the landscape of sun, heat, sea and a general sense of loosened boundaries.

The concept of a female predator is always interesting and here it's complicated by us being inside her head so that it can be hard to separate fantasy, memory, desire and reality. Definitely a slippery text with a provocative premise. 3.5 stars rounded down as I needed a little more direction.