I love books that take a real life event and spin a fantastic story around it. The World to Come is like a dream, and the book itself very much mimicked a dream. Some parts were lucid, others are confused and scattered. The plot weaves among characters, and I occasionally struggled with the sections highlighting characters I found disturbing or boring.
We read this for a February book club, and the facilitator brought a few interesting tidbits along, which made my appreciation for the book deepen. Generally I try to finish and review book club books before our discussions because I don’t want other opinions to taint mine. However, I’m glad these tidbits found me before writing. First, the author was pregnant when she wrote, which is interesting considering Sara’s life and the author’s account of the location of the world to come, and second, the described painting actually was a Chagall painting stolen from a Jewish museum and mysteriously returned in the mail.
Chagall’s Over Vitebsk is shown below.
Overall, I enjoyed the transition from the 1930s through the 1980s and back again, though all of the time periods are rife with struggle – the Depression, Russian Communism, and Vietnam. Horn weaves together the story of the artist, how the painting is passed down to modern-day, and what happens after it goes missing – all conjecture heavily based in fact.
The book was due soon, so I returned it to the library today and realized just after I dropped it in the slot there was a slip of paper in it of the painting’s name. Hopefully this will inspire the next reader to find out a bit more about the history of this novel.
