Paris in the Present Tense
Mark Helprin, 2017
The Overlook Press
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781468314762
Summary
The magnificent new novel by the gifted, singular #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War.
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, Mark Helprin 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, Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Harvard University
• Awards—National Jewish Book Award
• Currently—lives in Earlysville, Virginia
Mark Helprin is an American novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. While Helprin's fictional works straddle a number of disparate genres and styles, he has stated that he "belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend"
Biography
Helprin was born in Manhattan, New York in 1947. His father, Morris Helprin, worked in the film industry, eventually becoming president of London Films. His mother was actress Eleanor Lynn Helprin, who starred in several Broadway productions in the 1930s and 40s. In 1953 the family left New York City for the prosperous Hudson River Valley suburb of Ossining, New York. He was raised on the Hudson River and later in the British West Indies. Helprin holds degrees from Harvard University, and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Helprin's postgraduate study was at Princeton University and Magdalen College, Oxford, University of Oxford, 1976-77. He is Jewish-American, and he became an Israeli citizen during the late 1970s. He served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force. Helprin is married to Lisa (Kennedy) Helprin. They have two daughters, Alexandra and Olivia. They live on a 56-acre farm in Earlysville, Virginia, and like his father and grandfather who had farms before him, Helprin does much of the work on his land.
Novels, Short Stories and Periodicals
His first novel, published in 1977, was Refiner's Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling. The 1983 novel Winter's Tale is a sometimes fantastic tale of early 20th century life in New York City. He published A Soldier of the Great War in 1991. Memoir from Antproof Case, published in 1995, includes long comic diatribes against the effects of coffee. Helprin came out with Freddy and Fredericka, a satire, in 2005. His latest, In Sunshine and In Shadow, was released in 2012, and has been described as an extended love song to New York City.
Helprin has published three books of short stories: A Dove of the East & Other Stories (1975), Ellis Island & Other Stories (1981), and The Pacific and Other Stories (2004). He has written three children's books, all of which are illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg: Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Helprin's writing has appeared in The New Yorker for two decades. He writes essays and a column for the Claremont Review of Books. His writings, including political op-eds, have appeared in The Wall Street Journal (for which he was a contributing editor until 2006), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, National Review, American Heritage, and other publications.
Controversy
Helprin published an op-ed for the May 20, 2007 issue of The New York Times, in which he argued that intellectual property rights should be assigned to an author or artist as far as Congress could practically extend it. The overwhelmingly negative response to his position on the blogosphere and elsewhere was reported on The New York Times's blog the next day. Helprin was said to be shocked by the response.
In April 2009, HarperCollins published Helprin's "writer's manifesto", Digital Barbarism. In May, Lawrence Lessig penned a review of the book entitled "The Solipsist and the Internet" in which he described the book as a response to the "digital putdown" heaped upon Helprin's New York Times op-ed. Lessig called Helprin's writing "insanely sloppy" and also criticized HarperCollins for publishing a book "riddled with the most basic errors of fact."
In response to such criticisms Helprin wrote a long defense of his book in the September 21, 2009 edition of National Review, which concluded: "Digital Barbarism is not as much a defense of copyright as it is an attack upon a distortion of culture that has become a false savior in an age of many false saviors. Despite its lack of mechanical perfections, humanity, as stumbling and awkward as it is, is far superior to the machine. It always has been and always will be, and this conviction must never be surrendered. But surrender these days is incremental, seems painless, and comes so quietly that warnings are drowned in silence."
In May 2010, Helprin wrote an article which stated that China's military is "on the cusp" of being able to dominate Taiwan and the rest of the Far East.
Honors and Accomplishments
A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Helprin has been awarded the National Jewish Book Award and the Prix de Rome from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He is also a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. In 1996 he served as a foreign policy advisor and speechwriter to presidential candidate Bob Dole.
In May 2006, the New York Times Book Review published a list of American novels, compiled from the responses to "a short letter [from the NYT Book Review] to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'" Among the twenty-two books to have received multiple votes was Helprin's Winter's Tale.
In 2006 Helprin received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. This award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
On November 8, 2010, in New York City, Helprin was awarded the 2010 Salvatori Prize in the American Founding by the Claremont Institute. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[Helprin's] generosity of language and emotion allows room for missteps as well as brilliance. 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.
Max Byrd - 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 ofthe rare writers for whom this is not the case.… His books are romances in the chivalric mold, in which beauty, love and bravery possess a greater reality than the characters dedicated to honoring them. This is true again in his enchanting new novel, Paris in the Present Tense.… This passionate and uplifting book produces a kind of music that few living writers know how to create.
Sam Sacks - Washington Post
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 - Boston Globe
In his seventies, widower Jules Lacour sits at the top of an accomplished life…. But now the pleasures of the present are vying with obligations to past and principle as Jules risks fraud to save a dangerously ill grandson.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) The fluidity of Helprin's prose…makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A modern-day story of love, music, and death, with echoes of the Nazi retreat in World War II France.… A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity. Perfect for the pure pleasure of reading.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does Mark Helprin use flashbacks to tell Jules Lacour's story? How does this technique affect your reading of the novel, and of Jules as a character?
2. What role do the city of Paris and its history play in the novel?
3. What did you make of Jules' ultimately unsuccessful experience composing Acorn's "telephone hold music"?
4. How did the violent acts on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim change your understanding of Jules? Was Jules' reaction to the events he stumbled upon justified?
5. How does Jules' Jewish faith and heritage inform his actions and beliefs? How is today's rising wave of religious intolerance framed and portrayed in the novel?
6. What does the Seine — the dangerous channel where Jules has rowed against the current for six decades, and the depths into which he submerges himself following the events on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim — symbolize in the story?
7. Characters like Detectives Arnaud and Duvalier, young Elodi the cellist, the insurance agent Armand Marteau, and Professor Amina Belkacem emerge, disappear, and re-emerge throughout the novel. Why are their stories told in this manner? Whose narrative did you find the most powerful or effecting?
8. How does Jules weigh his loyalties and obligations — to Jacqueline and years past, to his grandson Luc and the promise of his family's future, and to his own present feelings and desires for Elodi and Amina — throughout the novel? How do his past experiences affect the decisions he makes?
9. Jules begins the novel as a 74-year-old man with deeply rooted habits and beliefs. How does he change throughout the course of the novel? What, if anything, prompts these changes?
10. The theme of an older man's infatuation with a youth appears throughout literature. For example, Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me," Cohen and Melissa in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, to name just a few. How is Jules similar to his predecessors in this regard, as a man close to death who grasps at the incarnation of youth and life, and how does he differ?
11. Despite his experiences with the Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, Jules calls music "the oxygen that had kept him alive" (392). How can this be true? What does music mean to Jules, and why?
12. The virtues of right-conduct, courage, modesty, self-discipline and self-sacrifice are largely absent from the modern anti-hero, whose job is often to show them as destructive and hypocritical. This book is different. How? Why? And what is your view?
13. In an interview with Open Letters Monthly, Helprin calls Paris in the Present Tense a novel about, among other themes, "dying well." He says, "knowing how to die well makes it possible to live well." What does it mean to you to "die well"? Does Jules "die well"?
14. The author has stated that the more work you put into a book, the more you get out of it. He has also stated that one of his goals is to draw in, entrance, and transport the reader to the point where, like a dream, at times the book seems more real than reality. These statements may seem contradictory, but are they?
15. Would Paris in the Present Tense make a movie you might like to see — visually, emotionally, musically, and in terms of action, suspense, and even humor.
(Questions issued by the publisher, The Overlook Press.)