The world to come dara horn
The World to Come
Fiction based on real, recognizable and historic personages can be rather tricky. Is the fiction retelling their stories, and if so, why? How much is real and how much is embellished? Why does the author use these figures instead of inventing her own? And, most importantly, how believable is this fictional account of these very real people? Novelist Dara Horn tackles these issues in her ambitious and well-intentioned second book, THE WORLD TO COME. Horn's challenge is complicated further by her use of the life and work of a particularly enigmatic Yiddish writer, Der Nister ("the Hidden One"), as well as the life and work of Jewish painter Marc Chagall.
THE WORLD TO COME is a novel of stories. And stories within stories and the intersection of all these stories. It is also about loss, possibility, meaning and potentiality. Benjamin Ziskind, former child prodigy and current quiz writer for "American Genius," is newly divorced and has just lost his mother. He is depressed and a bit angry; when he finds himself staring at a painting by Marc Chagall that used to hang in his family's home, he instinctively (and quite easily) steals it fr
The World, To Come
What drove you to make Marc Chagall so central to The World to Come?
The book is about the theft of a Chagall painting from a museum during a singles’ cocktail hour; it really happened at a temporary exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. In the same exhibit, there were some illustrations Chagall had done for a children’s book by Der Nister, who is one of my favorite Yiddish authors. I realized that Chagall had illustrated books for many of my favorite writers, and I began wondering how he had known them. I discovered that one of Chagall’s first jobs when he was a young man was as an art teacher in an orphanage in Russia for Jewish boys who had been orphaned by the pogroms—and Der Nister had been one of his housemates in faculty housing there, as had several other Yiddish writers.
It eventually dawned on me that Chagall was nearly the only person in this circle of artists to die a natural death; almost all of the others (including Der Nister) were murdered in various ways under the Stalinist regime. Chagall was atypical of this circle in that his work was not tied to a language that needed translation, and he became famous because o
The World to Come
Entertainment Weekly Editor’s Choice * New York Times Editor’s Choice * A Book-of-the Month Club Smart Readers Selection * A Book Sense Top 20 Pick * Winner of the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles’ cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows and who is sure the painting used to hang on a wall of his parents’ living room. As Ben tries to evade the police, he and his twin sister, Sara, seek out the truth of how the painting got to the museum, whether the “original” is actually a forgery, and whether Sara, an artist, can create a convincing forgery to take its place.
Eighty years prior, in the 1920’s in Soviet Russia, Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys. There Chagall befriended the great Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym “Der Nister,” The Hidden One. And there, with the lives of these real artists, the story of the painting begins, carrying with it not only a hidden fable by the Hidden One but also the story of the
I picked up The World to Come by Dara Horn when it was on sale for $1.99 for the Kindle. It seems like the kind of book I would like. Here is how Amazon’s review describes it:
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.
History, faith, mystery, and the other-worldly? Yes, that is something I need to check out.
I found it to be both fascinating and frustrating. I really enjoyed the multilayered stories that make up the majority of the book. Horn creates some great characters, weaves in history, art, literature, philosophy and religion for a complex and mystical brew. But then at the end she adds on this awkward and completely off-putting, for me, section detailing what happens before bab