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Monday, 21 January 2008 |
By Michael Wallner
Translated from the German by John Cullen
John Murray 2007: 248p, softcover, Village Voice price €13,
Your French News Price €12
The inspiration for ‘April in
Paris’, says the German actor
and screenwriter Michael Wallner
in his “afterword”, came to him
one day when he was stuck in a
storm battering the cliff he was
attempting to climb in Normandy.
No wonder, then, that, in the jargon
of blurb writers, this first novel is a
cliff-hanger. The story rests on a
simple equation and is,
notwithstanding the musical title
and the dancing couple featured on
the cover, as bleak as ‘Romeo and
Juliet’ re-enacted in an SS
interrogation centre. It is narrated by a young Wehrmacht
corporal, whose fluent knowledge of French lands him the
unenviable job of interpreter at the Gestapo headquarters on
Rue de Saussaie in Paris.
A sensitive, bookish fellow, he hopes
to retain his sanity after attending torture sessions by slipping
into civilian clothes and taking long walks through the
occupied city. One balmy April evening he catches sight of a
young woman, the daughter of a bookseller whose shop he has
just visited; and what is fated to happen from the first page of
the novel, happens: he follows her, chats her up and falls in
love with her – only to discover that she is in the Resistance.
The corporal’s leisurely Left-Bank strolls soon face him
with a nightmare choice of betraying his masters or his
mistress. As the war turns against the Germans and the struggle
between occupiers and occupied becomes increasingly
murderous, he becomes a hunted creature with nowhere to turn
and nothing to sustain him except an impossible love.
The story has a level deeper than the fate of the two lovers.
How, the author seems to ask on every page, can love survive
in a time and place where ordinary, decent human feelings are
at best a liability, at worst a fatal weakness? It’s a terse and
powerful tale; and in this age when torture and terror are again
facts of life, there is nothing rose-tinted or nostalgic about it.
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