Among
America’s immigration novels, Ethopians hadn’t much
presence until The Beautiful Things
That
Heaven Bears. This first
novel by a young Ethopian émigré is different
from the typical pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant story. The Beautiful Things That
Heaven Bears (the title comes
from Dante’s Inferno)
is a melancholy and sometimes funny story of an exile caught between
his homeland and his adopted country.
Author Dinaw Mengestu structures the novel by alternating past and
present chapters. Sepha Stephanos fled to America after his
father’s arrest and murder by revolutionary soldiers in the
1970s, leaving his mother and younger brother behind in Addis Ababa.
Sepha made his way to Washington, D.C., where an uncle lives, working
first as a hotel bellhop, attending community college for a year, and
then opening a grocery store in the rundown, largely African American
Logan Circle neighborhood. He has been in the United States 17 years
when The
Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
opens. Logan Circle is gentrifying, but Sepha’s prospects are
declining because the more affluent new residents don’t
frequent his shabby store.
Sepha and his two African friends, “Ken the Kenyan”
and “Congo Joe,” spend their free time drinking,
testing one another’s memory of African dictators, and
expressing disillusionment with the American dream. When a white
academic and her 11-year-old biracial daughter rehab the house next
door to his apartment building, Sepha makes uncertain attempts to
befriend his new neighbors — but as with his store, things
don’t work out as he hoped.
Sepha’s attitude (though maybe not his prospects) has an
uptick at the very end of the book. Mengestu has had an easier time
than his main character. His immediate family all escaped Ethopia
during the country’s Red Terror.
Mengestu graduated from prestigious U.S. universities and in his 20s
was already writing for high-profile magazines.
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