Paris in the Present Tense (Helprin) - Discussion Questions

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.)

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