It’s occupied Paris, 1943. Corporal Roth a young translator in the German army is transferred to Gestapo headquarters to translate confessions of tortured Resistance fighters. He speaks flawless unaccented French and while he can't stomach the SS torture of Resistants he performs his role. To escape after his translation job, Roth wanders the city dressed in civilian clothes - a crime of high treason - and is touched and amazed to be taken for a Frenchman. He commences a love affair with the city, the language and Chantal, a Left Bank antiquarian bookseller's daughter. Yet all is not as it appears, even behind the Gestapo chief’s demeanor.
 
Wallner fleshes each character with dimension and depth, his prose elegant and arresting. Atmospheric and page turning, APRIL IN PARIS takes readers to a Paris of the mind and pulls us back into the reality of 1943. Rationing, collaborators, the Gestapo’s infamous cells on rue des Saussaies.  Wallner, a German, brings a unique and deeper insight into a time romanticized by the film CASABLANCA and the novels of Alan Furst. The moral dilemmas faced by people caught in a war through no conviction of their own. An edgy, darker tale, wistful at times, for me reminiscent of another German novel ˜1941” by Felix Hartlaub. ˜1941” was culled from Hartlaub’s writings discovered by his sister after his death in the bombing of Berlin, ˜1941” published after World War II also carries with it that yearning, that melancholic ache to be part of
Paris which a soldier wearing the German feld-grau uniform was excluded from. Hartlaub, a German soldier, was an outsider in Paris, like the character of Roth longing to get in.

Wallner gets the era’s details pitch perfect. Describing a scene on
the Left bank we see daily life under the Occupation:
The heat had rolled up the chestnut leaves. In the overgrown gardens that sloped down to the river, women were at work, bent over on their knees, tending potato plants, pulling up weeds......There was a baby carriage in the shade of a tree, and next to it the child’s mother huddled, dressed in black; another woman was cutting grass with a sickle.

Roth discovers Chantal’s part in the Resistance and the suspense mounts. Naive and in love, he’s unaware the SS and the Resistance have feelers out everywhere, and nothing remains secret for long. April in
Paris isn’t like the song but one wonders if it ever ever was. The poignant unexpected ending took me by surprise. Highly recommended, I couldn’t put it down.