The Victim

I always look to the first line of Bellow's The Victim as the summation of all that hot weather is, even if it is place specific: 'On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok'  Ten short words and only one  of them polysyllabic'; but this is an instance where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Simplicity that would grace a poem. Unadorned, unfussy, I've loved this line since that day back in the early '80s when I found a cheap copy in a gas station book rack somewhere in upstate New York.

London feels like Bangkok today - pulpy, muggy, steaming - the thermometer seems set to keep this way for sometime now.

It's also had me thinking of those French novels I've read where summer is more than background, it drives behaviour; surfaces hidden, even unknown desires; and there's an alchemy present where bored dreams carry the seeds of solid reality.

In my mind here, I have a picture of middle aged office drudge alone in a Parisian summer with his family away in Normandy slipping into a series of fruitless, casual affairs. Driven out his apartment by boredom and broiling nights, it's an inevitability. As it is that there'll be no change at the end of the summer. The jigsaw reassembles itself, the old picture reforms. He'll be there at the Gare Montparnasse or Gare St Lazare, to twirl his kids in the air and kiss his wife as they step off the homecoming train.