| Approaching the Past in The World to Come |
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| Written by Jayme Herschkopf | |||||
| Wednesday, 18 January 2006 | |||||
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Some Musings on Dara Horn’s Newest Novel When I was ten, I picked up Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story with some trepidation. Though I flipped to the end and could see plainly that the book did not actually go on forever, the title’s assertion put me on guard. I suspected foul play, that somehow the pages would swallow me into them and never let me out. As it turns out, that was precisely what happened. Except not to me. The main character of the book, Bastian Balthazar Bux, starts reading a book called The Neverending Story, and then finds himself participating in the book, and eventually transported to a magical world to encounter all sorts of adventures. I suppose it was supposed to be a dream come true for most children, but to me, the idea was a nightmare. I couldn’t sleep for a week. Reading Dara Horn’s new book, The World to Come, has been a similar experience, except this time the title did not give me fair warning. As soon as I started reading, I felt an eerie connection with the book, almost as though it were pulling its material out of my head. Small details—the main character, like me, is a twin who once suffered from scoliosis—were disconcerting enough, but when the prose seemed to peer into my thoughts and dreams and write itself in response, I started getting goose bumps. I don’t presume to call myself an author, let alone one of Horn’s talent, but I kept thinking this was a book I should have written. The book begins with Benjamin Ziskind, a child prodigy who had the misfortune to grow up, stealing a Chagall painting from a museum during a cocktail party. While chronicling his adventures after the heist, the story also moves backwards, tracing the painting’s path from its origins in a 1920’s Soviet orphanage to its eventual place in the living room of Ben’s childhood home. Tying the entire history together is the mysterious figure of Der Nister, an anonymous Yiddish writer, whose name means ‘the hidden one,’ and whose writings somehow align with the painting and the fates of all who come in contact with it. Horn is not even thirty, but her narrator displays the wisdom of people thrice that age. Perhaps she manages it because of how much she gleans from Yiddish literature, whose supernatural tales span authors across centuries. Her title refers to a selection that discusses the realm to which souls go when they die. In her version of it, these souls help to cultivate the souls of future members of their families. I don’t think Horn writes to make her readers believers in the world to come. But she made one out of me. If our souls are developed by loved ones who have already experienced the world, it makes a lot of sense that what draws us most in life—be it paintings and stories, as in the novel, or anything else—often feel so familiar. What we love is never new. Our loved ones once showed it to us. We have simply forgotten. I will not leave Horn’s book—or its world to come—any time soon. But that doesn’t frighten me anymore. Whatever adventures may await me, I know I’ve already been prepared.
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