Paris in the Present Tense

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 ...