a book
Paris in the Present Tense
Mark Helprin · 2017 · 400 pages
[Read by Bronson Pinchot]
The New York Times bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin reveals a powerful, rapturous 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 with its 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 who is 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.
The New York Times bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin reveals a powerful, rapturous 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 with its 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 who is 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.
recommended by 1 person
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Brian Koppelman
“Certain writers fall out of favor for certain reasons, often having little to do with the work itself. In that vein, let me recommend Mark Helprin, maybe the most beautiful American prose stylist of his age. Paris In The Present Tense is a glorious novel. Writers: read this book.”↗