Paris in the Present Tense

By the bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin's powerful new novel is set in Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour - a maitre at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in [...]
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By the bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin's powerful new novel is set in Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. 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. 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 to 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, Helprin forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth. In the exhilarating beauty of its prose and evocative storytelling, 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.