Summer

Summer is the novel’s pressured present: a late-August season in Almería in which heat, pain, waiting, and desire shape how time passes. For Sofia Papastergiadis, the season is not simply an interval of leisure. It is the setting of her care for Rose Papastergiadis, her uncertain attempt to move beyond that responsibility, and her growing recognition of what she wants. The narrative makes summer feel at once suspended and urgent, its bright landscape threaded with illness, work, and the possibility of change.

Setting and Seasonal Time

The season is established through extremes of heat and exposure. At the beach opposite a cement factory, Sofia finds gas canisters, a rusty child’s swing made from a car tyre, cranes at a desalination plant, and heaps of cement powder below unfinished hotels and apartments cut into the mountains. The Mediterranean Sea offers neither uncomplicated escape nor reliable safety: warnings about Jellyfish and reports of severe stings can make the water a place to avoid, even as Sofia repeatedly longs to enter it. The landscape carries the marks of development and industrial use alongside the summer’s intense physical beauty.

Summer also produces a sense of suspended time. At night, Sofia looks at the Starfield screensaver on her laptop and thinks about the difference between the ancient age of the stars and the manufactured image on her screen. Her broken screen leaves her uncertain whether she will still be in Almería by the time a replacement arrives. The question is bound to Rose’s condition and to the indefinite demands of care. The season’s apparent openness—long days, beaches, and travel—coexists with a future that cannot be confidently planned.

Care, Memory, and Bodily Pace

Summer is paced by Rose’s variable mobility and the practical routines of caregiving. At the clinic, Sofia and Rose limp together across the marble floor, matching their pace so that Sofia can act as her mother’s support. Sofia describes this as walking with Rose’s legs, a bodily arrangement that makes their closeness tangible while also showing the limits it places on Sofia’s movement. The contrast is sharpened by Rose’s independent walk to the local Spar earlier that morning: she had bought hairpins without taking a walking stick, a fact Sofia does not want to dwell on. Mobility in this season is neither stable nor easily interpreted.

The mother’s requests for water make care repetitive but never entirely predictable. Sofia brings water from different bottles, or boiled and cooled water, yet cannot be sure which kind will be right. Even the fridge at the injury hut prompts her to think about the difference between sparkling and still water and about how to make water more suitable for Rose. These small decisions give the season its intimate rhythm: care consists not only of major medical encounters but also of repeated acts whose success is uncertain.

That rhythm enters Sofia’s own body. After walking with Rose, she sometimes finds herself limping, as if her body has retained the habit of matching her mother’s gait. She recognizes that memory is unreliable and incomplete, but the limp shows how caregiving persists beyond the immediate occasion. The season’s time is therefore not measured only by dates or appointments; it is also carried forward in bodily habits, fatigue, and the repeated adjustment of one person’s pace to another’s.

Work, Precarity, and Interrupted Independence

Sofia’s summer remains connected to economic and domestic insecurity. She works at the Coffee House, where Dan from Denver messages her about a marker pen used to label sandwiches and pastries. Later, he repaints the storeroom walls and asks what to do with her anthropology books, shoes, and winter coat. To him, the refurbishment is minor; to Sofia, the room was her temporary home, marked by the Margaret Mead quotation she had written on its wall. Its repainting turns a practical change at work into the loss of a place she had treated as her own.

These details complicate the season’s association with freedom. Sofia can reach the beach, drink at a café, or imagine a different life, but she remains exposed to unstable housing and uncertain employment. Her days move between work, caring for Rose, and brief escapes that do not resolve those pressures. Summer offers openings rather than security: the possibility of movement is real, but it does not remove the material conditions constraining that movement.

Desire and Seasonal Intimacy

The season also makes desire difficult for Sofia to keep at a distance. She remembers Ingrid Bauer putting honey on her cracked lips, and remembers lying on the beach with Juan after midnight. At the village Spar, while buying still water, she wants a magazine whose free gift is a pair of Jackie Kennedy-style sunglasses. She imagines wearing them among the cacti in a private Camelot of Lust with Ingrid and Juan beside her. The image gathers summer’s heat, fantasy, and sexual uncertainty into one scene of imagined possibility.

A yellow silk top becomes another focus for that changing self-understanding. Sofia has worn it nearly every day; it smells of coconut ice cream, sweat, and the Mediterranean Sea. When she washes it, she looks closely at the embroidery and realizes she has misread the blue word. The discovery unsettles the meaning she had attached to the garment and leads her to consider whether she is entitled to desire at all. Summer intimacy is consequently both sensual and interpretive: the body wants, but Sofia is still learning how to read what she wants and what she may claim.

In a later beach scene, Ingrid and Sofia lie among the rocks beneath the cliffs, using handfuls of black seaweed wrapped in towels as pillows. Ingrid has embroidered the precise markings of a lizard onto Sofia’s white satin dress. Coconut oil on Sofia’s curls, shins, feet, and cracked lips makes touch and care part of the same intimacy. The scene’s warmth does not erase uncertainty, but it gives their relationship a physical and creative form within the season.

Landscape, Reversal, and Significance

The summer environment is not merely a stage for private feeling. Reports of a gasoline spill lead the sea police to order swimmers out of the water; Ingmar disputes their instruments, drinks a bottleful of seawater when challenged, and becomes sick. Stories about contamination and the drowned dog of Pablo connect local rumor, official testing, and bodily consequence. Water, which has been a recurring object of care for Rose and a desired refuge for Sofia, is also a vulnerable environment whose condition can change without warning.

The season’s most consequential reversal comes when Sofia sees Rose walking alone along the shore. Rose, wearing a sunflower-print dress and carrying a hat, appears content in her own company. Sofia initially thinks she may be a mirage, then chooses not to approach; instead, she goes back into the water and swims with her back to Rose. When she finally returns to shore, she finds Rose’s footprints and draws a rectangle around the first prints with a stick. The moment does not settle the meaning of Rose’s impairment or Sofia’s responsibility. It makes visible, instead, a possibility that the caregiving arrangement has obscured: Rose can move on her own, while Sofia can choose whether to follow.

Summer thus gathers the novel’s central tensions into a season of heat, exposure, and fluctuating capacity. The sea can invite Sofia away from the role of caregiver, yet stings, contamination, and anxiety make escape costly; Rose’s walking can suggest independence, but it does not dissolve the history between mother and daughter. By placing work, bodily memory, desire, and environmental uncertainty within the same late-summer present, the narrative makes the season a measure of both constraint and change.