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The World to Come

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The World to Come

By: Dara Horn
Narrated by: William Dufris
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An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World to Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically-acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey-based Ziskind family.

Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister Sara forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was stolen from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists Sara to create a forgery to replace it. While trying to evade the police, Ben attempts to find the truth of how the painting got to the museum.

From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia where Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys, to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn weaves a story of mystery, romance, folklore, history, and theology into a spellbinding modern tale. Richly satisfying, utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come", not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now.

©2006 Dara Horn (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc. Genre Fiction Jewish Literary Fiction World Literature Fiction

Critic reviews

"A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present, and how we haunt the future." (Time)
"Spellbinding....A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths." (Booklist)

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I read this story for book club. It has a decent plot which is laid out thoroughly; however it fails to transition well in jumping between timelines. The jumping around is understandable to lay the background of the story but the parts it jumps to next are seldom connected.

The narrator sounds like the evil Kermit the Frog character at the Gulag in the last muppet movie in his attempt at eastern European dialect, its difficult to take him seriously, and his female vocalizations are like nails on a chalkboard. He mispronounces several common Jewish names and phrases which also leaves the audience with raised shoulders and winced eyes akin to the nails on a chalkboard reference.

I probably will not recommend this book to anyone either in print or audible, I don't feel the narrator did the author justice. Her flaws were few his were in multiplicity.

Decent Plot - Narrator doesn't do it justice

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Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

The story was at times intriguing and promising, and I like Dara Horn. Go for the print version of this, though, and look to her other novels for better characters. I find the major romantic relationship that develops to be poorly and unbelievably written, but really enjoyed just about everything else and found myself wanting much more of the "flashback" moments of various perspectives.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The narrator was so irritating in three ways that I had to force myself not to throw my listening device in frustration. First: he was utterly incapable of conveying a single female voice, to the degree that he seemed to be making fun of every single woman just for existing. No thanks. Better to just speak in a normal tone than to mock. Second: he was equally incapable of conveying any even vaguely Eastern European accent. His Yiddish and Russian accents were much more like a cross between Kermit the Frog and imitations of Northwest Native American "accents" (the characters in "Smoke Signals" come to mind). This is to say: they were utterly, ridiculously insulting. On that note, my third great irritation was the inability of this narrator to seek appropriate guidance to pronounce even the most well-known of names in the Russian-Jewish cultural world. Sholem Aleichem. Der Nister. It isn't hard. Any first-year Yiddish student could have helped him. Any one of thousands of Jewish grandparents could have advised him. Instead, it's like a little knife being twisted in your stomach hearing the wrenching mispronunciation of a name that really, really deserves better treatment.

Worst narration ever listened to

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Very engaging novel! Creative, beautiful with well developed characters in a multigenerational intertwining story. I loved it!

The world to come is worse waiting for

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Dara Horn has created a masterpiece that contain many wonderful things and is vividly portrayed in this audio reading. So much of the novel is like a story told to a child and has ironic sophistication through the eyes of the characters especially the twin lead characters when they were children. These oral narrative aspects make the novel even better when heard rather than read (although I will read it for a second experience since it is such a fine work of literature.) Horn weaves together story lines that trace through several generations of a Russian American Jewish family- tales that are both hilarious and profoundly moving and philosophical. I learned so much about art, spirituality, Chagal, Yiddish story telling, and many new ways to look at living, survival, and the meaning of death and life. Dara Horn's use of language and detail motifs is just short of brilliant and most original. Anyone who has an interest in religion, cultural adaptation, and transformational spirituality, must experience this multi- layered book.

A fascinating journey , heartful

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delightfully magical as a Chagall, who makes appearance. Transcedant 19th/final chapter portrays world to come.

mystical novel moves lyrically in and out of time

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I found this to be one of the most enjoyable of the 200 + books on tape that I have listened to. It belongs right up there with other great "reads" such as "The History of Love" and "The Book Thief". If you liked those two, you'll like this one as well. The story was fascinating, the writing was excellent and, contrary to what the previous reviewers have said, I thought that the narration was very good. I highly recommend this book.

Great book!

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This is one of those frustrating books which had the potantial to be absolutely first-rate, but which the author messed up. There are many wonderful and moving things in it and I wondered with so much rich material why was I often irritated and bored. Some parts are unbelievable, some suffer from overkill and "soulful" writing, some don't integrate. It's like two novels interrupting each other. Still, Ms. Horn has talent, originality and important subject matter. This novel is struggling to be born. Also, I'm not sure she got the ending right. We seek the Tree of Immortality after we are born, not before, and we do it because of the whack the angel gives us before birth.

A wonderful half failure

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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This is a wonderful story of several generations of a Russian Jewish family and the love that holds them together despite many trials and much suffering. The writing is beautiful and the characters leap off the page.

What did you like best about this story?

The final chapter of this book is one of the best I can recall reading. So clever and endearing -- a lovely way to bring everything together at the end of the book.

How could the performance have been better?

Yes -- the narration is the least appealing aspect of this book. The reader does not know how to do a Russian accent -- a very big problem for this story. The publisher should have found someone else to read this book.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I did cry in the end-- not out of sadness but joy.

Such a beautiful story!

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Would you consider the audio edition of The World to Come to be better than the print version?

Chagall sounds like Kermit the Frog. The producer should have caught this. Its a terrible "listen". I am caught up in the story so I must finish. PLUS I've paid for it!

Would you be willing to try another book from Dara Horn? Why or why not?

Yes.

What didn’t you like about William Dufris’s performance?

TERRIBLE

TERRIBLE READER

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I didn't understand all of the bad reviews about the narration because it starts out fine. That's until the characters with accents step in and it brings a lovely listen to a complete standstill. It sounds as if the whole thing is a joke. Whoever let this get through is nuts. Read it.

Narrator is a total buzz kill

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