Paris in the Present Tense

Helprin Mark Helprin

Description

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 maitre 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.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781468314779
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

More praise for Paris in the Present Tense
A rhetorician would fail to account for the 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.
- The New York Times Book Review
In most of the novels written in the United States since World War II, we find characters who have little or nothing to believe in Mark Helprin is one of those rare writers for whom this is not the case his enchanting new novel, Paris in the Present Tense , [is] a ballad to the cardinal virtue of loyalty joyful and celebratory.
- Wall Street Journal
The ironic mode, one of prevailing literature s prevailing orthodoxies, is of no interest or use to Mark Helprin. His fiction, while flirting with the downright metaphysical, aims directly for the heart. His concerns are with truth and beauty [his] ambitions are grand.
- Commentary
Above all else, this well-plotted and engaging novel-filled with thoughtful ruminations on life accompanied by sumptuous writing-is a love letter to Paris. Mark Helprin seems to know the city as well as any Frenchman Grand in scale with one interesting, fully-developed character after another nearly a perfect contemporary novel.
- New York Journal of Books
A fable from a master 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. The words most appropriate for this novel happen to come from French: It is a tour de force.
- National Review
This revenge tale, wrapped within a contemporary historical novel, provides a morphology of the type of mind that these days is too scarce. The mind belongs to an old man, with contemporary in this case meaning the duration of his rich, utterly focused, consciousness Helprin can multi-task with the best, moving fluently from one layer of time-space narrative to another, story-telling as three-dimensional chess.
- New English Review
It is the fluidity of Helprin s prose that makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating. Helprin s principal achievement lies in his subtle, often profound exploration of religious intolerance, capitalism, and technological advances in stark contrast to [his protagonist] Jules s inspiring humanism. These themes are never didactic but instead build on the metaphor of the Seine with its treacherous current, whirlpools, and half-submerged tree trunks churning just below the surface
- Booklist (Starred Review)
Gripping and often poignant, Paris in the Present Tense was worth the wait. If America, France, and the rest of the West succeed in revitalizing their political and literary culture, one sign of it will be more writing that approaches the elegance, intelligence, and grandeur of Helprin s work.
- City Journal
Highly recommended Buoyed by Helprin s irresistible prose, this sleek novel weaves a tangled thread, tackling weighty themes with brio. An addictive page-turner that will leave you reeling.
- France Today
Sumptuous descriptions and complex characters There s a reason that Paris appears in the title-the novel is also a paean to that great city.
- Tampa Bay Times
In Mark Helprin s latest, a master novelist confronts music and mortality Helprin is an American treasure.
- The Federalist
Paris in the Present Tense offer[s] the reader passage to a literary landscape of gripping narrative, radiant descriptions, a rich tableau of memorable characters and achingly moving insights. the story carries the reader stirringly forward while delving into, exploring, and raising multiple themes. All are timely. Many are timeless.
- Canadian Jewish News
Mark Helprin s novels are long, luxurious reads, with vivid descriptions of settings and characters that draw readers in. Paris in the Present Tense is Helprin at his best. In the midst of injustice and betrayals, the author holds out the possibility of a perfected love and justice.
- Claremont Review of Books
Copyright
This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2018 by
The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS
195 Broadway, 9th floor
New York, NY 10007
www.overlookpress.com
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address above.
Copyright 2017 by Mark Helprin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-1-4683-1477-9
For Julian Licht, Jules Hirsch, and Francine Christophe With thanks to William Winston - Poet, Critic, Friend
Contents
Praise for Paris in the Present Tense
More Praise for Paris in the Present Tense
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I. R ISING AND A LOFT
Air France 017
Paris in Recollection
The Insurance Salesman Armand Marteau
Fran ois Ehrenshtamm, Philosophe
This Jack Person
Writing a Jingle in Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Jacqueline at Sparta
The Past Upwells
The Policeman Is Your Friend
A Million Swimming Pools
Amina Belkacem
A Thousand Lawyers
Lights Corruscating Through the Dusk
Touching Down
II. B LOOD W ILL T ELL
DNA
Catherine and David, Fran ois
Jacqueline s Photograph
1944
The Music Lesson
III. Loyal Mort
The Sun Comes Out for Armand Marteau
Spring Fire and Smoke
As Light and Warmth Put France at Ease
If, at Its End, Your Life Takes on the Attributes of Art
The Patient, Barely Alive, Had Collapsed on the RER
lodi, Jules, Duvalier, Arnaud, and Nerval
lodi Alone
August
Amina
On the Grand Terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Discussion Questions
About the Author
Jules Lacour was born in 1940, while his parents were hiding in an attic in Reims. His mother prayed that he would not cry, he seldom did, and in the four years that followed neither he nor they spoke above a whisper. That was the beginning of a long story.
I.
Rising and Aloft
Air France 017
A DISINTEGRATING AIRFRAME offers little in the way of second chances, and because this sometimes happens, taking to the air tends to heighten one s awareness of that which has come before and that which may come yet. Though travelers convince themselves that statistics watch over them, tension flows through airports like windblown clouds, and as an aircraft rises to 13,000 meters those within it may be drawn to assess what they love and what they hope for in the time left.
And when autumn weather on land may be pleasantly crisp and permissive of wearing a suit in perfect comfort, the North Atlantic is deadly cold and unforgiving. Swells that normally run at three or four feet can easily rise to ten or more, and even as freezing wind draws long lines of foam across the wave crests at thirty knots it isn t called a storm. Delicate airplanes constructed of a million discrete parts fly far above such cold and dark seas for hours as meals are served, movies screened, telephone calls made, and lights turned down while passengers sleep under soft wool blankets. But should the plane break up in the air or crash into the waves, death will have its way most horribly. Surprising for most, but not for all.
A huge, dark-gold, reddened sun had almost set. Manhattan s skyscrapers and tenements, painted in flame on their south and west sides, stood in impenetrable shadow on their north and east faces. And in business class on Air France 017, Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle - who, before they became airports, knew one another and were in power at the same time - a window seat awaited Jules Lacour, who found it, settled in, and assessed his quarters with less enthusiasm than they were supposed to elicit. Low walls that curved to provide privacy and call attention to their design allowed him to see the procession of boarders passing through: tourists and Egyptians, Philadelphia housewives and graduate students, a baby or two, but mainly, in the business and first class cabins, jaded men of affairs who an instant after taking their seats opened newspapers, laptops, or spiral-bound books full of tables and charts. That is, if they were not engaged in cell-phone conversations projected with the stiff self-importance that was their oxygen.
The flight wasn t full, it had boarded quickly, and traffic on the runways was such that the crew wanted to pull from the gate as fast as possible to be slotted-in for takeoff. As the plane was pushed back from the terminal, Manhattan came into view from the Battery almost to Hell Gate. The palisade of buildings was pitch black on its eastern face, but light from the sun side broke so hard upon steel and glass that its coronas roiled over the rooftops like waves breaking over a sea wall.
Although it was for him the scene of bitter defeat, Jules Lacour could not hold his own failure against a city that - unlike Paris, but like life - was beautiful both in spite of itself and as the sum of its ungainly parts. Manhattan was a gift not of form but of light and motion. From a distance or on high the persistent sound that rose from it, a barely audible hum that never ceased, might have been the whispered stories of all its inhabitan