WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW
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| “I wish that, like you, I could have spent my life transported aloft, as it were, every day, in music.”- Paris in the Present Tense, Mark Helprin |
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.
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.
Happy New Year's Eve! I hate New Year's. I don't really like things that celebrate the passing of time, which makes this book oddly perfect for the holiday.
Firstly, Paris in the Present Tense is a truly beautiful novel. This is going to be an extremely positive review, which means that I will not have much to say about it because, really, what is there to say about books like this beyond the fact that it is just beautiful? This is a book for someone often overwhelmed by the passage of time, a book for someone who often feels as if they don't belong where they are but can't think of anywhere else they'd rather be. This is a book for the person who constantly sways between his intellectual side and his emotional side. If you are any of those, or all three, this is the book for you.
Jules Lacour is just a wonderful character to follow around, in a book full of wonderful characters to follow around. His sense of humor and boundless love for everything was so wonderfully refreshing given the many, many fashionably cynical characters 2017 has produced. Refreshingly too, the majority of the humor in this novel is not sardonic or offensively funny, but rather lighthearted, with a lot of word-play and absurdist conversations. My favorite comic relief were the two detectives, their back and forth and true affection for each other worked so well.
Even so, there is sadness in the novel, and there is no one I felt worst for then the hapless insurance agent, Arnaud. My heart ached for him, and I was so happy that everything worked out for him and his family because I felt so bad for him and how his hideous coworkers treated him. If anyone deserved a win, it was him.
Helprin's view of Paris also deserves mention. Many novels portray Paris as this Utopian of art, music, and intellectualism. Helprin does not, and it feels so much more realistic. In this book, France's flaws are exposed- the prejudice against Jews, the mutual dislike or distrust felt by many locals and North African immigrants towards each other. France is a beautiful country, but also one deeply flawed- just like every other country.
And so I loved Paris in the Present Tense. It is entirely likely that Paris in the Present Tense will make it pretty high up my favorite books list (which will be up after my wrap-up, I promise). Highly, highly recommended.
9 out of 10
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