Mark Helprin\'s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories.
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..
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.
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.
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.
Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour--a maitre 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.
Mark Helprin\'s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories