Antiquity

September 1, 2023

A thirtyish unnamed narrator falls hard for a glamorous older artist she interviews for a magazine and is promptly invited to visit her on the Greek island where she summers. There, she finds herself more and more attracted to her host's teenage daughter. Billed as a queer Lolita; Swedish author Johansson won the 2021 Katapultpris for this debut. Prepub Alert.

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November 20, 2023
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.

November 15, 2023
A fiction debut that explores the intersection of desire and power. The story's unnamed protagonist, a woman who's a writer, becomes infatuated with an artist called Helena after interviewing the older woman for an article. When Helena offers the narrator an invitation to spend the summer in Greece with her, the protagonist sees this as an opportunity for their relationship to deepen. At first, Helena's teenage daughter, Olga, is an unwelcome distraction, but, eventually, the protagonist's attention turns to the girl. First published in 2021, this novel earned lavish critical praise--including literary prizes--in Sweden. Johansson uses her chosen setting to good effect. Her characters are surrounded by sumptuous sensory experiences but also isolated, and that isolation enhances the sense of pending disaster that permeates the text. Whether or not readers appreciate this work, though, will depend largely on their reaction to the first-person narration and the slow pace at which the plot unfolds. The protagonist is an outsider; indeed, she seems to be a mere observer of her own life. At the same time, her desperate loneliness makes her solipsistic. Her obsessions are more about her need for an identity than any particular qualities of the people with whom she becomes obsessed. This trait makes psychological sense, but, as the only character given a point of view, she becomes rather tiresome company, and the pacing only exacerbates the issue. While no one should expect this story to read like a thriller, fiction doesn't have to feel like a chore to have literary merit. The author does, ultimately, provide us with an intriguing thought experiment: How would we react if the protagonist had been a man? This may not be an entirely satisfactory first novel, but Johansson has strengths that make her a writer to watch.

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January 1, 2024
A mesmerizing journey into the roots of intimacy, Johansson's debut novel gives a skillfully crafted, well-defined face to loneliness. Set in Ermoupoli and narrated in a highly observant first person voice, it traces the psychological dynamics of the unnamed narrator as her desire for her friend, Helena, is replaced by a forbidden lustful longing for Helena's teenage daughter, Olga. Despite the emotional intensity, there is a matter-of-fact quality to the woman's narration, creating an unsettling tension between her inner world and her observations of those around her. Apt for its Greek setting, Antiquity also artfully emanates mythological sensations by invoking the guest-host motif and memorializing beauty, both of which allow loneliness to take on multiple forms, including jealousy, sadness, and even anger. At the core of this emotional canvas is a meditation on how the hunger for human connection consumes boundaries between self and other. Antiquity will entice those looking for an introspective reading of social behaviors through which a single moment or a simple gesture communicates an internal complexity of unknown depths.

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