The scene is Brussels, a summer afternoon, and the city seems suspended, silent, waiting. A young girl reads a letter from a friend who is away from the city on vacation. André then opens the narrative—fiction? document?—into a journal of the city in summer, which she presents as an urban landscape of open, empty spaces, from pastoral parks to corporate plazas. Brussels' architecture, and its residents engaged in the transactions of daily life, are the essential elements with which André establishes a mood, a sense of time and place. When we return to the young girl, glimpsed in the kitchen, her restlessness and ennui have been contextualized by André's subtle yet incisive description of time passing in the city on a summer day