The World to Come
by Dara Horn
In a spiritual context, I would hazard a guess and say that the phrase “the world to come” implies the encroachment towards heaven for most people. To me, it seems to imply a departure of this world and a deliverance to another—which, when looked at in that respect, probably causes whatever notions of heaven to come to mind when asked for first associations upon hearing that phrase. (Obviously, I could be wrong as I am admittedly generalizing here.)
Dara Horn’s The World to Come is at its root a novel that deals with spirituality, authenticity (in a fundamental way, not in a Brooklyn hipster searching for fringe delights kind of way), and cultural inheritance. Because of the spiritual element it is the type of novel that if I were to explain the plot with a good amount of detail, I would imagine that a lot of people would shut down and shrug and think of a polite way of saying Why would I ever want to read that? Which then puts me in the awkward position of trying to be descriptive of the novel in this review without overstepping my bounds and causing the reader to become deaf and blind to this unexpectedly great discovery of a book. I myself would have probably passed on this book if I knew more about it. The only thing I knew about the book was that it revolved around Benjamin Ziskind stealing a print by Marc Chagall from a museum because he believed that it was stolen from his family (the print hung in his house and he thought that someone had taken it after his mother died). I knew that the book was about Ben and Sara Ziskind, twin brother and sister, and their search through their family history spurred on by the events that happened at the museum, and I assumed that the book would center around Jewish life (and mythology) dating back to the times of Chagall leading up to the present day.
But I didn’t anticipate the thickness of the spiritual themes and religious imagery and symbolism. And I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would like the book all the more because of their inclusion. The World to Come is full of bridges, angels, heaven, and the duality of life. But again, I’m cautious about going into great detail for fear of turning people off. If I had read a full review of the book that includes details of what occurs in the last 100 pages I probably would’ve passed too. And I wouldn’t have passed on it because of the inclusion of the spiritual symbols and themes of the book, but because the inclusion of these things in a novel can be boring or overly didactic or allegorical to read if written by the wrong hands.
Dara Horn does a fantastic job with writing this novel. The World to Come does a good job of balancing the serious (Jewish life in eastern Europe pre- and post-WWII; the life of Der Nister; what happened to Sara and Ben’s father in Vietnam), the typical (the story of Ben and Sara and, to a degree, the people tied directly to them), and the surreal (the end of the novel, with its imagery of eating paintings and drinking books). My biggest gripe with this book was that I never fully believed the relationships that Ben and Sara have with their girlfriend and husband, respectively, but since these story lines aren’t central to the book it didn’t bother me too much.
As I said earlier, this is a book that I would recommend—especially as a summertime read as it reads pretty quick and is only a hair over 300 pages long—but one in which I don’t want to reveal too much of. So with this in mind I will end this review with an excerpt; an excerpt that I feel does a good job in not only showing off Horn’s writing ability but also because it does a great job of balancing the joyous with the sad. For this book does have, to me, an unexpected amount of death in it. (But like any book worth its salt that deals with death it redeems itself at the end, which is why I think Horn swung for the fences with the ending that she went with.)
Below is the excerpt, a brief passage about Ben and his thoughts about his pregnant twin Sara:
But now he thought of Sara and remembered all the biology facts he had gathered for American Genius, the DNA and RNA and chromosomal combinations and matching nucleotides and Punnett squares and probabilities and genetic futures. Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.
The World to Come is not a perfect book. But as is sometimes the case, it’s not always the perfect books that resonate but rather the unexpected ones.
