Paris in the Present Tense
Ratings3
Average rating4.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating4.7
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
“Just as a curve is a series of infinitely small angles, and according to philosophers a point cannot exist, logically there is no present but only the infinitesimal and perhaps nonexistent space between past and future, as any schoolchild thinking about space and time might suspect. One that distinguishes Paris, however, making of it a magnet of attraction, is that it turns all this on its head. In Paris the present dominates the spectrum of time....The past is present in its reverberations and sustain, and the future is present in the clarity and beauty of its promises.”
The plot of Paris in the Present Tense centers on Jules Lacour, a seventy-four year old cellist living in Paris. His only grandchild is dying of cancer. Lacour must figure out a way to help his grandson get treatment. I don't want to say too much, but know that there are other important plot elements including an attack by racists and a love affair with a much younger woman.
The plot is wonderfully intricate, but so are the characters and so are the great wisdoms shared by Lacour in the story.
Paris in the Present Tense will definitely be on my Best of 2018 list.
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