Book Reviews
[T]he book succeeds, in part because Horn gracefully plays off certain words and images, using them as touchstones and leitmotifs: the title phrase and the Chagall painting; the recurring references to wombs, caves, bridges and the dents that angels supposedly leave beneath our noses. Little connections leap the narrative gaps and draw story lines together. Throughout this rich, complex and haunting novel, Horn reminds us that our world poses constant threats to the artist and to art, to the individual and the creative spirit. Their very survival is a miracle: in a sense, every one of us is that bearded man flying, unaware, over Vitebsk.
Susann Cokal - New York Times Book Review
Horn writes about theology and moral imperatives and the afterlife—as though she didn't realize that such things just aren't done in sophisticated literary prose. But that daring is endearing, especially when it flows from deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come—or the one before.
Ron Charles - Washington Times
Horn’s prose sallies along with confidence and intensity, sometimes to the point of whimsy, which means that the novel is, by turns, profoundly bleak and fantastically sweet... The World to Come is the stuff of dreams, enchanting and daring ... [Horn] has a spiritual and moral intuition that transcends most of her contemporaries. This is no mean feat—especially since she combines it with a flair for fantastical storytelling.
London Times
A deeply involving tale, a family saga and a mystery... brilliantly imagined... The novel may sound over-ambitious — pogrom and privation, familial and romantic love, life after death (and before), not to mention high art and quiz shows. And yet it all seems to work—beautifully.
Wall Street Journal
Isn't there a Willy Wonka gum that tastes like all good foods at once? If so, Dara Horn's The World to Come is the literary equivalent of that confection, equal parts mystery, sprawling novel, folktale, philosophical treatise, history, biography, love story and fabulist adventure... each page of her novel is a marvel.
San Francisco Chronicle
Horn's roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there's no question that this book is the real thing.
Chicago Tribune
Piercingly beautiful... delightful and often funny... Almost romantic, almost tragic, almost comic, almost mystical— the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.
Newsday (Long Island, New York)
A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future.
Time
Former child prodigy Ben Ziskind-5'6", 123 pounds and legally blind—steals a Marc Chagall painting at the end of an alienating singles cocktail hour at a local museum, determined to prove that its provenance is tainted and that it belongs to his family. With surety and accomplishment, Horn telescopes out into Ziskind's familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam (where Ben's father, Daniel, served a short, terrifying stint); and the paradoxes of American suburbia, a place where native Ben feels less at home than the teenage Soviet refugee Leonid Shcharansky. Ben's relationship with his pregnant twin sister, Sara, a painter who eventually tries to render a forgery of the painting to return to the museum, is a damply compelling exposition of what it means to have someone biologically close but emotionally distant. Horn, born in 1977, expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and Daniel's job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book's title.
Publishers Weekly
Horn's accomplished second novel (after the award-winning In the Image) reads like a dynamic hybrid of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Milan Kundera's philosophical flights of fancy. It is an artful exploration of a Jewish American family's Eastern European roots, a rumination on forgery in art, and an inventive exploration of the work of Chagall and the forgotten writings of his Russian compatriots. Finding himself alone after his divorce and his mother's recent death, Ben Ziskind distracts himself with work, crafting questions for a TV quiz show. When he decides to steal a Chagall painting that once belonged to his mother, his actions shake him from his hermetic shell. Flashbacks to Ben's past and to the lives of Chagall and his one-time novelist friend, the Hidden One, merge together. Horn deftly weaves an intricate story steeped in folklore and family secrets. Along the way, readers are offered glimpses of the possibilities, allegorical and otherwise, of life's beginning and end. This is intelligent, compelling literary fiction; recommended for public libraries. —Misha Stone, Seattle P.L.
Library Journal
A heist with a twist, Horn's engaging second novel (after In the Image, 2003) explores the history behind a stolen painting as well as the saga of the family that owned it for nearly a century. Recognizing it from his childhood living room, Benjamin Ziskind, a socially awkward quizmaster, lifts a million-dollar Chagall during a museum cocktail hour. We quickly learn that the master painter once taught art to Ben's grandfather in a bleak Russian orphanage in the 1920s. The piece, a sketch for the famed Over Vitebsk, was a gift from the artist to his young pupil. Of additional intrigue to the museum and eventually to Ben are a series of stories written by a legendary Yiddish author (and Chagall's onetime neighbor) that are hidden in the painting's frame. As Ben is pursued—not by the police, oddly enough, but by Erica Frank, a museum staff member—Horn shuttles readers through three generations of the Ziskind family, loosely following the painting as it changes hands, crosses an ocean and withstands enormous turmoil. The family history, and Ben's own covert investigation of the painting's place within it, uncovers questions of authenticity on multiple levels and leaves him (along with his twin sister and accomplice Sara) with a heavy moral decision to make. Despite the vast oscillations in time and place, the story is remarkably coherent, and it is only in the last 50 pages that Horn runs out of gas. The romance that buds between Ben and Erica is trite and seems tacked on to the otherwise finely crafted tale. And the author's reliance on symbolism and doubles, which is subtly effective throughout, becomes unwieldy. After an appealing journey into the past, Horn should have left her readers in the present; her final chapter is a confusing and corny look into "the world to come." An engrossing adventure, in spite of its flaws. Fans of art and Judaic studies will particularly enjoy this well-researched work.
Kirkus Reviews