The World to Come - Softcover

Dara Horn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241143616 ISBN 13: 9780241143612

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006

Synopsis

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.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0241143616
• ISBN 13: 9780241143612
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1