As Dara Horn writes in the Author’s Note of her brilliant new novel, The World to Come, the story has humble origins. Its first chapter is based on an actual event: a Chagall painting is stolen from a museum during a cocktail hour. From there, the novel divides into three strands. First is the tale of thief Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy who has had the misfortune to grow up into a decidedly ordinary adult. Next is the history of the painting’s travels, from its origin in a Soviet orphanage (where Chagall actually worked as an art teacher), where it was given to Boris, Ben’s grandfather, to its (almost) final resting place in the museum.
Finally, there are the stories of one of Chagall’s colleagues at the orphanage, a Yiddish author who calls himself Der Nister, The Hidden One. His strange tales, described as “kaleidoscope stories with tiny worlds packed one inside another,” are buried into dated anthologies that no one reads, but in The World to Come they are given new life, told by both Rosalie Ziskind, Ben’s mother, and by the narrator herself.
One particular story binds all the strands together: that of the world to come. It is described as a nebulous blissful campus, with classrooms, restaurants, bars, dormitories, and public baths, but there is a vague sense of its bordering the snow storage units of the sky, the Garden of Eden, and one side of nowhere. The souls of ancestors help cultivate the gestating souls of future generations for nine months, who are smacked just below the nose by an angel at departure, and forget everything. Their experiences in the world to come remain part of them, and when they encounter in life what their ancestors once showed them, it strikes them as eerily familiar. What they love is never new.
Although The World to Come imparts a great deal of wisdom, the final scenes introduce new sources of confusion, and the book concludes before we (and it) have time to sort through them. What does Ben do about his discovery of a kindred soul in the figure of curator Erica Frank? What does it mean to be original? Does art need to mean anything? Just when things start to fit together, we are smacked just below the nose with a slew of unanswered questions.
Though the experience may be frustrating, it reinforces one of Horn’s central points. Der Nister tells Chagall, “There are no real endings in life, either. Since when do things end?” The book ends with the blank slate of a birth, and with it, an infinite number of possible worlds to come.
