- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd; First Edition edition (3 Aug 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0241143497
- ISBN-13: 978-0241143490
- Product Dimensions: 20 x 14 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 784,277 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
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.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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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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