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 ma tre 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...