- Paperback: 401 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Open market ed edition (5 July 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 014103131X
- ISBN-13: 978-0141031316
- Product Dimensions: 18 x 11 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 953,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Horn s deft touch is often wryly funny but never maliciously so. . . . An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory create us. --Natalie Danford
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
By the winner of three national awards, a daring, ambitious, and wildly readable novel.
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I loved this book. It has many layers - and while at first it seems like there are perhaps too many layers - if you just give in to the richness of the parallel stories, you'll be rewarded. It's the sort of book you think about for a long time after you've finished the last word.
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
It's a long time since I've been as confused by the experience of reading a novel as I was by "The World to Come". There are a lot of tick-boxes that made me think I would enjoy it -- in no particular order: Marc Chagall (around one of whose paintings the narrative ebbs and flows); 'rave reviews' when it was published in America; Hamish Hamilton (along with Allen Lane, the most reliable of Penguin's imprints); an interesting dust cover and a modest blurb. The narrative spans three generations of a Russian-Jewish (and later American-Jewish) family, one of whom is taught by Chagall as a boy in an orphange and there swaps a painting of his own for one by his (soon-to-be-illustrious) teacher. On its journey, the book offers some whimsically engaging musings on the merits of painting versus writing, the moment versus the journey, the here-and-now versus the now-and-always, time and a handful of dust. There are stories within stories, some of them charming, others more problematic: we are supposed to believe that one of the characters made her living as an author and illustrator re-telling Yiddish stories, slightly updated; Ms Horn reproduces the text for some of them, in prose that would have children running from the room and rushing for the remote. In a book that brushes with issues of authenticity, there's a cumulative lack of credibility: the narrative rattles on at great pace, but the historical research feels thin and unimagined. These nagging doubts took time to coaslesce (at least they did for me), but no one can escape the conclusion. The final chapter of the book is an embarrassing mess, but it does make some sort of sense of the previous 350 pages. Not since I had the misfortune of reading "The Lovely Bones" have I come across such hyperbolic twaddle. It's embarrassing, it's messy, and way, way too long. If someone took a blue pencil to this books, they could probably salvage something much better. Let's hope Dara Horn and her editors exercise greater discipline next time.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The author of this novel, Dara Horn, has made a study of Yiddish literature and makes a worthy attempt to bring it to life through her characters,their philosophy, and through the re-telling of parts of the original tales. She has a rich palette of characters, some based on real people and some entirely fictional. However,she attempts too much, and it is difficult for the reader to follow the threads of her narrative because they skip about from one individual to another in a constantly changing time frame. Sadly her own litarary style does not match that of her models.
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