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The Overlook Press

Paris in the Present Tense

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Title
Title: Paris in the Present Tense
Author: Mark Helprin
ISBN: 9781468316681
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2018
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reprint
Number of Pages: 400
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: Paris in the Present Tense, Mark Helprin's powerful, rapturous novel, is set in a contemporary City of Light 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.