I read this book while I was on my vacation and I think it is exactly that sort of book :a vacation one. It is ok.

You can compare my review to the other one on this book. OUr views are not the same.

I found this book, which I read in French while living in California, to be a delight. It takes place in Liege, in the country of Simenon's birth, long before most of the novels. And part of the suspense (for it is a suspense murder mystery) is waiting for Maigret to appear.

Eventually the large figure in his dark winter overcoat enters the story, well supplied with his pipe(s) and tobacco, his mind racing over possibilities. And we are not disappointed, even after reading countless later stories. Not only does Simenon give us a satisfactory ending, but we have a splendid picture of an almost "old world" Liege and the kind of people who lived and worked in it.

No, definitely not just a "holiday book", this. Rather, a book for all seasons. Give it a try and you will agree.

Atmosphere is stranger than in others Maigret's novels. But it's also very good novel. If you have read "Pedigree" (Simenon's childhood autobiography) you can make interesting parallels between one of the two young boys and Simenon himself. It seems to say to us that the line between criminals and the other humans isn't very large ...

I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
Buchenwald).

Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.