Description
For sale: a Rare and Exceptional first edition, first printing paperback copy of Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin.
The exterior of this paperback edition is in Near Fine condition, with clean, illustrated covers with no creases, clean page blocks, mild surface wear, strong title on an un-cracked spine, a tight binding with no spine cracks, strong spine ends, mild edge wear and lightly rounded corners. The interior of the book is also in Near Fine condition with no 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.
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 manila envelope with book wrapped in both craft paper and multiple layers of bubble wrap.
