Sofka Zinovieff's The House on Paradise Street describes the Greek malaise better than many Greeks could have put it down. An aside: the book is set in the neighborhood where I grew up (Mets); even my high school (13^th High School of Athens) is mentioned, although it is not actually there any more. Here it goes:

What hat previously been exotic became annoying, starting with the details of daily life. What sort of country expects people to put their shitty toilet paper in baskets instead of down the drains? Why couldn't they install normal drain pipes like everywhere else? Why is it considered normal to have power cuts on end during summer heatwaves and winter storms, as though we were living in Gaza and not twenty-first century Europe? Why are seatbelts seen as an infringement of liberty (even for children), when they know that the roads are the most dangerous in Europe? Why is the Greek's idea of freedom interpreted as the freedom to park across the pavement, blocking women with pushchairs and pensioners, or the freedom to smoke incessantly, everywhere? Of course, once I started down this slippery slope, the questions came faster and more furiously. Why was it considered normal when we handed the surgeon a “small envelope” containing 3,000 euros cash when Nikitas had a minor operation in a state hospital? [...]

Above all, the thing I had tired of was the Greeks' obsession with themselves, with the nature of Greekness, with how they are viewed and how unfairly they are judged. Beware of saying even the slighted critical thing about Greece to a Greek as they will take it as though you have said their mother is a whore and their father her pimp. [...]

Looking back on my disillusionment with Greece, I realise that I had forgotten to place it alongside the extremes that mark so much of life there–a ratcheting up of intensity so that each experience takes you further than it might elsewhere. It starts with the senses. Colours, sounds, smells and tastes are richer in Greece (the tang of lemons off the tree or spearmint in salad, tomatoes or figs that taste of the sun). But these extremes continue so that emotions are stretched to breaking point in all directions. The lack of safety precautions is all part of the thrill; political correctness will never catch on.

On Bad Times, Courtesy of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

As the heatwave we are going through draws to an end, one could think of the blessing of bad times—not just weather—on us, as put in Out of Africa:

Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly, surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognize one another, and the things cry out to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: ‘You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.’ That bad time blessed us and went away.