The World to Come - Hardcover

Horn, Dara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241143497 ISBN 13: 9780241143490

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2006

Synopsis

A million-dollar Chagall painting is stolen during a singles' event at a New York museum. The painting has an unusual history, and now there is an unlikely thief - Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who now writes questions for TV shows and who believes the painting once belonged to his family. Benjamin's moment of apparent madness in stealing the painting is just one such moment in a web of riveting stories. For him, for his family and for Chagall, life is a breathtaking collision course of past, present and future, and 'the world to come' starts right now.

About this title

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

About the Author

Dara Horn, born in 1977, is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Harvard University. Her first novel, In the Image, received three national awards including the National Jewish Book Award. She lives in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241143497
• ISBN 13: 9780241143490
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416