Benjamin Ziskind, lonely divorcé and former child prodigy, attends a singles cocktail party at the Jewish Museum in New York and impulsively steals a small painting by Marc Chagall - a painting that used to hang on the wall of his parents' house.
So begins Dara Horn's second novel, an intergenerational tale encompassing the jungles of the Vietnam war, an orphanage in 1920s Russia and the New York childhood of Ben and his twin sister, Sara. It's also a treatise on the art of Chagall; a thesis on "the world to come", a strange, quasi-biblical realm where the past and future collide; and an introduction to Yiddish literature, particularly the fables by Der Nister and I Peretz that are woven through the text.
Will Ben return the stolen painting? Will he fall in love with Erica, the beautiful curator? What was his mother doing with a million-dollar Chagall? Why did his father only have one leg? Good questions, but in answering them the novel relies too heavily on coincidence, and the plot can feel laboured. As a series of individual vignettes, however, there's plenty to praise. Part mystery, part romance, this curious book is filled with both the sweet and the darkly sad - much like, in fact, the stolen painting at its centre and the mysterious "world to come".
