Mark Helprin

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. He forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.

A Novel

Paris in the Present Tense

Colton Ray

Really just not for me. I felt no relation to the main character. Indeed, I found him to be a bit of an elitist prick. Throughout the book, there are constant eye-rolling asides about "kids these days" and how everything was better back in the old days when men shaved and wore suits and listened to classical music. This may be an accurate portrayal of the so-called "Greatest Generation," but Helprin doesn't differentiate enough and it makes me suspect that this may be authorial bias creeping in. (view spoiler)[The story is basically just an old man goes to Paris, falls in love with a 20-year-old but is too much of a pansy to follow through, 'accidentally' murders two people, and tries to compose some kind of music for some reason, I don't remember and don't care enough to look it up.  (hide spoiler)] I figured I would try to read a book from a POV outside of my own, but this was just... booooooring, and if not for the decent quality of writing, I would not have persisted in skimming to the end.

Meagan Fowler

The ideas that were presented in this book were interesting and need to be adressed more often but the execution of it was not good.

Laura

Firstly, Paris in the Present Tense is a truly beautiful novel. This is going to be an extremely positive review, which means that I will not have much to say about it because, really, what is there to say about books like this beyond the fact that it is just beautiful? This is a book for someone often overwhelmed by the passage of time, a book for someone who often feels as if they don't belong where they are but can't think of anywhere else they'd rather be. This is a book for the person who constantly sways between his intellectual side and his emotional side. If you are any of those, or all three, this is the book for you.

Jules Lacour is just a wonderful character to follow around, in a book full of wonderful characters to follow around. His sense of humor and boundless love for everything was so wonderfully refreshing given the many, many fashionably cynical characters 2017 has produced. Refreshingly too, the majority of the humor in this novel is not sardonic or offensively funny, but rather lighthearted, with a lot of word-play and absurdist conversations. My favorite comic relief were the two detectives, their back and forth and true affection for each other worked so well.

Even so, there is sadness in the novel, and there is no one I felt worst for then the hapless insurance agent, Arnaud. My heart ached for him, and I was so happy that everything worked out for him and his family because I felt so bad for him and how his hideous coworkers treated him. If anyone deserved a win, it was him.

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

Paris in the Present Tense A Novel

Reviews