The World to Come: A Novel [Paperback]

Dara Horn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2006

"Nothing short of amazing."—Entertainment Weekly

A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-year-old quiz-show writer. As Benjamin and his twin sister try to evade the police, they find themselves recalling their dead parents—the father who lost a leg in Vietnam, the mother who created children's books—and their stories about trust, loss, and betrayal.

What is true, what is fake, what does it mean? Eighty years before the theft, these questions haunted Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish fabulist Der Nister ("The Hidden One"), teachers at a school for Jewish orphans. Both the painting and the questions will travel through time to shape the Ziskinds' futures.

With astonishing grace and simplicity, Dara Horn interweaves a real art heist, history, biography, theology, and Yiddish literature. Richly satisfying, utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"—not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now. Reading group guide included.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Following in the footsteps of her breakout debut In the Image, Dara Horn's second novel, The World to Come, is an intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, the New Jersey-based Ziskind family, and the "already-weres" and "not-yets" who roam an eternal world that exists outside the boundaries of life on earth.

At the center of the story is Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy who now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister Sara forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was wrongfully taken from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists his twin to create a forgery to replace the stolen Chagall. What follows is a series of interwoven stories that trace the life and times of the famous painting, and the fate of those who come into contact with it.

From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn takes readers on an amazing journey through the sacred and the profane elements of the human condition. It is this expertly rendered juxtaposition of the spiritual with the secular that makes The World to Come so profound, and so compelling to readers. As we learn near the end of the beautiful tale, "The real world to come is down below--the world, in the future, as you create it." --Gisele Toueg --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Former child prodigy Ben Ziskind—5'6", 123 pounds and legally blind—steals a Marc Chagall painting at the end of an alienating singles cocktail hour at a local museum, determined to prove that its provenance is tainted and that it belongs to his family. With surety and accomplishment, Horn (In the Image) telescopes out into Ziskind's familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam (where Ben's father, Daniel, served a short, terrifying stint); and the paradoxes of American suburbia, a place where native Ben feels less at home than the teenage Soviet refugee Leonid Shcharansky. Ben's relationship with his pregnant twin sister, Sara, a painter who eventually tries to render a forgery of the painting to return to the museum, is a damply compelling exposition of what it means to have someone biologically close but emotionally distant. Horn, born in 1977, expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and Daniel's job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book's title. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780393329063
• ISBN-13: 978-0393329063
• ASIN: 0393329062
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.8 x 5.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #245,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977 and received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006, focusing on Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2007 Dara Horn was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the "Best Young American Novelists". Her first novel, "In the Image," published by W. W. Norton when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. Her second novel, "The World to Come," published by W. W. Norton in January 2006, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize, was selected as an Editor's Choice in The New York Times Book Review and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by The San Francisco Chronicle, and has been translated into eleven languages. She has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard and at Sarah Lawrence College, and has lectured at universities and cultural institutions throughout the United States and Canada. Her new novel, "All Other Nights," was published by W. W. Norton in April 2009. She lives with her husband, daughter and two sons in New Jersey.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Out of this world March 8, 2007

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

In the Yiddish folk tales that are woven through this magnificent book, the World to Come is a heaven occupied both by those that have passed on and those that have yet to be born. So Dara Horn writes about families and generations: elders who have passed on (or in some cases been eliminated), adults facing tragedy, finding new love, or conceiving new life, and children trying to figure out what it all means. One folk tale tells of a town where nobody ever dies, because nobody has really truly lived; throughout the book, Horn is concerned with the quality of living, with risk-taking, faith, and trust, and with authenticity in life or in art. This may sound abstract, but Horn's writing is far from it; her greatest gift is to plunge the reader into the souls of her characters, sharing their experience through their eyes, ears, and skin.

In some ways, this novel reminded me of THE HISTORY OF LOVE by Nicole Krauss, another recent novel spanning several generations of Jewish families in Europe and America. Just as that was tied together by the fate of a manuscript whose history spans much of the twentieth century, so this also revolves around an artwork, or rather two of them: a small Chagall painting that is stolen from a New York museum at the start of the book, and some stories by the Yiddish writer Der Nister (the Hidden One), who ultimately met the same fate as numerous other Jewish intellectuals in Soviet Russia. Both art forms -- painting and folk tales -- offer ways of looking at the world that are instinctive rather than logical, childlike in their immediacy, and closer to religion than to fact. Both deal with other worlds. Many of the characters in the book are involved with the visual arts, but since this is a novel it is the stories that provide the connective tissue, offering a different way of seeing to stand against the many tragedies of the past century. As Horn acknowledges in the appendix, most of the stories are adapted from earlier writers, but her skill is to weave them into a narrative that links divers times and places in a web of feelings and perceptions rather than as points on the railroad of chronological logic. This wondrous novel seems to be at once totally original and to have existed for ever.

I have to admit that my attitudes to the book went through some changes. I was put off reading it for several months because of the excessive cuteness of the original cover [I see it has now changed]. It was not until I got into it that I realized that this was an adult story, childlike at its best moments, certainly, but never childish. Once I had come to trust Dara Horn as a storyteller, I felt she could take me anywhere: to modern life in New York, the privations of an orphanage in Soviet Russia, the horrors of Vietnam, or the imagined world of folk tales going back centuries. I found myself telling everybody I met that this was something on the level of Paul Auster's ORACLE NIGHT, Myla Goldberg's BEE SEASON, the Krauss HISTORY OF LOVE, or (in a non-Jewish context) Ann Patchett's BEL CANTO -- writers that one can trust completely, knowing that danger would be answered by joy, intrigue by the bright clarity of truth. But all these adventurous writers face the problem of bringing their many strands of feeling and event together into a satisfying conclusion. Horn's solution is to end with a folk tale of her own creation. I have to say that this is less effective than most of the adapted tales she had included earlier, taking the reader on an extended excursion to the other world when he is aching to know what happens in this one. But the emotional conclusion that lies behind this little parable is absolutely right, and brings this treasure-house of a book back to something simple and true.

47 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Storytelling at its best February 27, 2006

By Charents

Format:Hardcover

In the World to Come, Dara Horn manages to weave family history with myths of birth and paradise to create a beautiful tale. She begins with Ben Ziskind, who steals a Chagall painting from a museum when no one is looking. Ben is going through a bit of a personal crisis at the time, so it's unclear whether he is correct that this painting once belonged to his family or he is simply becoming delusional. We soon come to understand Ben, his motives, and his fears.

Horn's real talent is the ability to switch between scenes, timelines and perspectives all while keeping the interest of the reader. In many novels I find myself slogging through certain parts, biding my time to return to the characters I truly care about. All of Horn's characters are interesting, and I relished all of them equally.

Death is a common theme in the World to Come, and it is to Horn's great credit that her novel is nevertheless optimistic. The denouement may leave some readers craving for more details about exactly what happened next. That is Horn's plan, and she executes it with brilliance.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dara Horn has outdone herself! February 22, 2006

By I. Aldor

Format:Hardcover

After reading "In the Image", Dara Horn's impressive debut novel, I could not wait to read her next creation. "The World to Come" exceeded my expectations!

This beautifully written, multidimensional novel will have broad appeal to lovers of historical fiction, symbolic literature, mystery, romance and much, much more. The novel is deep and philosophical, but also is just plain fun to read with colorful characters and a suspenseful plot that smoothly carries the reader between different time periods and places. A lot of research obviously went into this work, and readers learn interesting, little-known facts about Marc Chagall's art, Yiddish literature, and Russian and American history by osmosis.

What makes art famous and what does it mean to own it? How does our family shape our destiny? When do we encounter "the world to come"? The book touches upon these questions and leaves you with even more. I guarantee you will be thinking it over after you have turned the last page. That is the sign of a great novel, and this book definitely deserves your consideration.

The most pressing question for me is ... when does Dara Horn's third novel come out?