Description
For sale: a Rare and Exceptional first edition, first printing hardcover copy of Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin in a new archival wrap.
The book is in Fine condition with clean, bright boards, strong title gilt on a straight spine, clean page blocks, tight binding, no spine tilt, lightly rolled spine ends, mild edge wear, . The interior of the book is also in Fine condition with the ghost of an erased price on the partially creased first free end paper. No other marks, inscriptions, or other signs of ownership inside. The end papers and the interior pages are clean and bright, making it an excellent addition to any collection.
The dust jacket is in Near Fine condition with mild surface wear, moderate to heavy edge wear, and the price on the front flap. Looks great in a new Brodart archival wrap.
Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris 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 time of life, 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. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.
Ships promptly in a corrugated mailer with book wrapped in both craft paper and multiple layers of bubble wrap.
