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
Paris in the Present Tense (Helprin) - Book Reviews
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