Paris in the Present Tense: A Novel - Softcover

Helprin, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1468316680 ISBN 13: 9781468316681

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Helprin is the acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, A Soldier of the Great War, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works. His novels are translated into more than twenty languages and read around the world. He lives in Virginia.

Review

“[Helprin has] an intensely lyrical voice that both heightens and deepens every sentence, at times attaining a kind of Joycean beauty . . . Part of this force comes from the images that fly off Helprin's sentences like glitter from a sparkler . . . His Paris does exist in the present tense, irresistibly, undeniably real and alive, as though summoned by its creator rather than imagined. In this, the novel performs perfectly the function of literature, which is not to escape the world but to enter more completely into it.”
- The New York Times Book Review

“In most of the novels written in the United States since World War II, we find characters who have little or nothing to believe in . . . Mark Helprin is one of the rare writers for whom this is not the case . . . His books are romances in the chivalric mold, in which beauty, love and bravery possess a greater reality than the characters dedicated to honoring them. This is true again in his enchanting new novel, Paris in the Present Tense . . . This passionate and uplifting book produces a kind of music that few living writers know how to create.”
- Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Paris in the Present Tense is a twilight novel, and its love affair, essential to any Helprin work, is a complex one, haunted by time . . . Helprin, author of the indelible Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, has always been most comfortable in the epic mode, retaining a classicist’s eye for beauty while preserving enough of the contemporary world to speak to the present. His prose has an aching beauty.”
- Saul Austerlitz, The Boston Globe

“Haunting . . . extraordinary.”
- PEOPLE magazine

“This is a very ambitious novel, to be read at many levels and thought about for a long time. Mark Helprin is his own master, telling a story that is in part a thriller and in part a reflection on the way of the world, its rights and its wrongs. In intention, he is closer to Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas than to any contemporary novelist I know of . . . The words most appropriate for this novel happen to come from French: It is a tour de force.”
- David Pryce-Jones, National Review

“On one level, Paris in the Present Tense is a caper, like The Sting, in which Jules comes up with an intricate and clever way to make his death pay off, quite literally. It’s also a bit of a romance, as he falls instantly and hopelessly in love (despite his devotion to Jacqueline) with a student named Élodi who is half-a-century his junior. Helprin’s style, however, elevates the story with sumptuous descriptions and complex characters whose conversations sometimes become analyses of such issues as anti-Semitism or meditations on the nature of music, time and love.”
- Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“A modern-day story of love, music, and death . . . A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity. Perfect for the pure pleasure of reading.”
- Kirkus, starred review

“The fluidity of Helprin’s prose . . . makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating.”
- Booklist, starred review

“Mark Helprin is a fabulous writer of the sort that makes you want to capitalize the word, a justly acclaimed master . . . Helprin holds the reader’s attention, directing it to things we see but ignore and to the inner life of the mind . . . entrancing.”
- Neal Gendler, The American Jewish World

“In Mark Helprin’s newest novel, Paris in the Present Tense, yesterday is never far from today . . . In his singing prose, unique characters and a story that is both heartbreaking and inspiring, Helprin has given readers a thoughtful gift.”
- The Emporia Gazette

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1468316680
• ISBN 13: 9781468316681
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400