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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2007, 248 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2008, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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Don't be misled by the title into
thinking that April In Paris is a fluffy
romance. Life and love are both battlefields in Wallner's anguished debut of wartime suspense,
translated from German, which quickly embroils the
reader in the tragic double-life of 22-year-old
Corporal Roth.
Roth is not an heroic figure, he's not even a
particularly moral or likable figure. He's simply a
young man who, for a few sanity-restoring minutes,
escapes his despised life as a translator posted to
the Gestapo's interrogation unit, to become
"Antoine", a French student, and ends up falling in
love with a member of the French resistance. This
relationship forces him to face an untenable moral
dilemma between obedience to the Reich and following
his heart, with appalling consequences.
First-time novelist Wallner paints an image of Paris
facing its 3rd year of occupation that is both
brutal, romantic and heart-wrenchingly sad. His
descriptions of the Gestapo interrogation techniques
are particularly powerful because he avoids
gratuitously graphic detail in favor of understated
descriptions that clearly illustrate the casual
efficiency with which the Gestapo interrogators went about their business. It is one thing for a soldier
to kill in the heat of battle, but quite another to
observe a man coolly considering the most
efficient methods to break a fellow human through
torture.
If you have enjoyed books such as
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink,
The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra or
Sebastian Faulks'
Charlotte Gray you're likely to find much to
appreciate in April in Paris.
About the Author & Translator
Michael Wallner is an actor and screenwriter. He
divides his time between Berlin and the Black
Forest. April in Paris, his first book,
is translated into English by John Cullen who has
translated more than 15 books from French, Italian,
German and Spanish including Susanna Tamaro's
Follow Your Heart from the Italian, Christa
Wolf's Medea from the German and Yasmina
Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul from the
French.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2007, and has been updated for the
May 2008 edition.
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