[3] His previous novels are The Weekly Card Game, a tragicomic study of quotidian repetition and The Layers of the City, a meditation on contemporary Paris, civilisation and barbarism (which was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Fiction Award and was translated into Turkish under the title Sehrin Katmanlari).,[2] and Napoleon's Double, a narrative enlisting history and philosophy for its own neo-baroque ends.
He has interviewed many writers, including Salman Rushdie, Joseph Heller and the art-historian and poet TJ Clark[12] Antoni, together with Anne Richter, established the renowned Professional Writing and Editing course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1988.
[14] Antoni's first novel, The Weekly Card Game, was published in 1994.It was described by the literary critic, Jean-François Vernay, in Antipodes magazine as 'a tour de force'.
[15] Vernay added: 'Trying to entertain using the subject of boredom is a risky challenge few writers would dare take up in an increasingly market-oriented publishing industry.
The comic effect is mainly achieved through a terse but very stylish prose sprinkled with deadpan humour, the action being revealed through the eyes of a self-effacing focalizer'.
It is a lament for time passing, a testament to the depth of passion, of love, even of feeling, yet within its vast ennui it is a rich and beautiful book written with great compassion and intelligence.
The narrative voice takes the reader from cafe tables to musings on the Internet to delvings into the history trapped in the geological strata beneath the city, to lovely, sharp philosophical moments .
[19] Pierce added, ‘The two most striking extended passages in the book emulate the kind of probing by naive inquiry found in the work of Jean-Antoine's hero, Voltaire.
The self-proclaimed servants of knowledge and “the empirical world” will still find that mesmerism and magnetism do the trick.’ Antoni’s fourth novel, Travelling Companions, was published in 2021 and it was reviewed by the novelist Paul Morgan thus: 'The recurring details, circling stories, and performance of departures and returns, make Travelling Companions more reminiscent of oral storytelling than a compact modern novel.
The narrator carries Bocaccio’s Decameron with him, but his tale hints at a far older, pre-literate tradition, when travelling storytellers would recite a long chain of stories linked by a subtle thread, such as Scheherazade, for example .