Review by New York Times Review
with A sure sense that drama is contrast, Mark Helprin's new novel about Paris begins in that city's mighty opposite, New York. And not in the light that is Paris's hallmark but in the darkness above Manhattan as Air France 017, heading eastward, splits "a path through the night, rising and falling more smoothly than a boat on a gently rolling sea." This is only the first of the innumerable contrasts wrapped helix-like around the story of Jules Lacour, a septuagenarian cellist of extraordinary sensitivity and gloominess (he is French, after all). There is the contrast of the evanescence of music - "born into the air only instantly to die" - and the absoluteness of silence. There is the contrast of men and women (he is French, after all), of coarse America and subtle Europe, of Jew and gentile, of the Nazi past in which his parents perished and the ominous present in which his grandson, Luc, lies dying of leukemia. And finally there is the contrast of youth and age, for although Jules falls in love instantly and often - in Raymond Chandler's words, he's about as hard to get as a haircut - he falls most hopelessly for his beautiful young student Élodi, who is entering life just as he is increasingly aware of his own evanescence. In other words, "Paris in the Present Tense" is a novel about love, and therefore about loss. If these are clichés - what's more threadbare than May and December, student and amorous teacher? - Helprin revitalizes them with the energy of his language. A rhetorician might slice his prose style into scraps of Greek - asyndeton here, hypotaxis there - but that would fail to account for the intensely lyrical voice that both heightens and deepens every sentence, at times attaining a kind of Joycean beauty: "The compassionate dead looking on were infinitely wiser than the living, so many of whom never stopped for an instant as they thrashed through life like fish in a net." Part of this force comes from the images that fly off Helprin's sentences like glitter from a sparkler. (Motorcycle riders are "helmeted like bugs." Antennas on a roof shake in "aluminum hysteria.") Part of it comes from the sensuality of Jules's response to the physical world around him - the erotic flow of cloth over body in a flight attendant's uniform or as simple a thing as the burning of a stack of wood, in which he sees a "ballet of rising smoke." And especially there is his response to color and motion. As he runs toward the novel's climax, Jules hears all around the music of his life, gathering "everything he knew and had known," turning it into "a massive whirlwind of red and silver light" and then into "a lion of fire, the sun's leaping corona." This is not to say the novel is without flaws. The plot moves andante. Maddening coincidences will elicit a groan. Characters confuse conversation with autobiography. Jules's self-absorption leads to occasional passages of wearying profundity, when the golden sentences begin to fray. And, as always, the comic - Helprin's heavyhanded satire of Americans - shows itself the enemy of the lyric. You never know what is enough, Blake said, unless you know what is too much. But 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'S most recent novel is "The Paris Deadline."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 26, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Jules Lacour, a 74-four-year-old widower and music professor at Paris-Sorbonne, is navigating the complexities of the modern world. Traumatized as a child by witnessing his parents shooting by the SS and again as a soldier in Algeria, Jules had carved out a simple life, devoted to wife and daughter and finding sublimity in the transcendent waves emanating from his prized cello, once his father's, and those of the Seine, on which it has been his daily ritual to row for the past 60 years. It is the fluidity of Helprin's (In Sunlight and in Shadow, 2011) prose that makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating and Jules a lovable if flawed hero. Helprin's principal achievement lies in his subtle, often profound exploration of religious intolerance, capitalism, and technological advances in stark contrast to Jules' inspiring humanism. These themes are never didactic but instead build on the metaphor of the Seine with its treacherous current, whirlpools, and half-submerged tree trunks churning just below the surface while Jules glides skillfully along in his delicate shell. Determined to help his gravely ill grandson and others he believes he has failed, Jules occupies the infinitesimal and perhaps nonexistent space between past and present, yet he will be long remembered after the last page is turned.--Kelly, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A modern-day story of love, music, and death, with echoes of the Nazi retreat in World War II France.Septuagenarian Jules Lacour is a widower and a cellist in agony after losing his wife, Jacqueline. His grandson, Luc, has leukemia and will die without treatments that neither Jules nor his daughter, Cathrine, can possibly afford. Stage fright has always prevented him from achieving fame and fortune, and he considers himself a failure. Though in terrific physical shapehe runs, he rows on the Seinehe wants to die and be with Jacqueline again, because "he himself did not need to live. It was Luc who needed to live." Then, mirabile dictu, a "giant international conglomerate" asks him to write "telephone hold music," promising obscenely high pay that would easily cover Luc's treatment. Jules delivers beautifully, but alas, complications ensue. An intelligent and deeply sympathetic man, Jules remembers the day in 1944 when a Nazi soldier retreating through Reims heard his father playing Bach on his cello instead of La Marseillaise, realized the cellist was a hidden Jew and executed the family, leaving only 4-year-old Jules. That shock shaped the man Jules became, but it's just one thread the author weaves. He is in no hurry to finish telling this beautiful tale as he lavishes attention on characters such as Armand Marteau, perhaps the worst insurance salesman in France; a team of homicide detectives, a Muslim and a Jew, eating a ham lunch with a judge; and women of ineffable beauty with whom Jules falls into instant love. One, lodi, is a cellist 50 years his junior. Even the conglomerate has a personality: "the great, indefatigable, trillion-dollar machine of Acorn, a dispositif with neither soul nor conscience." As lodi declares to Jules that she will be his student, he sees "directly into her eyes, and never had he beheld a more elegant and refined woman, not even Jacqueline." The conversations often read like mini-essays, as when Jules tells lodi about the "jealous" God of the Jewsarguing with Him is "like a goddamn wrestling match." A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity. Perfect for the pure pleasure of reading. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
