Paris in the Present Tense - Hardcover

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

The fluidity of Helprin's prose . . . makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating.

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

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

Haunting . . . extraordinary.

Paris in the Present Tense is a novel about love, and therefore about loss. . . . 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.

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

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.