Paris in the Present Tense
Books | Fiction / Literary
4.2
Mark Helprin
Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present. In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine—Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.
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More Details:
Author
Mark Helprin
Pages
400
Publisher
Abrams
Published Date
2017-10-03
ISBN
1468314777 9781468314779
Community ReviewsSee all
"Very long, with moments of true beauty interspersed, but verrrry long. I wanted to love this book, and I was excited to read another Mark Helprin book, but it was too slow and the main character, who lived almost entirely in his head, held little interest. When I read the glowing reviews, I wondered whether we read the same book. Helprin’s love of Paris is clear. Sadly, this was a slog for me."
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