the beautiful things that heaven bears by dinaw mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu gave me that gift this morning in the novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by allowing me to explore DC and Addis Ababa through the eyes of his narrator, Sepha.

All he wants is to close his eyes, to sleep.One of the things I like most about a book is the possibility of completely inhabiting a new culture or rediscovering a familiar one. Sepha is in the gutter just like all of us, but he's beheld enough for one lifetime. Oscar Wilde's line 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars' takes on poignancy here. Sepha speaks to a profound truth of immigration: movement is not always positive. But loneliness unchecked–encouraged, even–is different. Loneliness tempered by forbearance is pathos by struggle, tragedy.

But he persists in his anomie, losing everything–money, friends, the store–as he strips to his essence. My goal since then has always been a simple one: to persist unnoticed through the days, to do no more harm.'Īttachments beckon: friends, customers, obliging hookers just outside his shop, even a white prof slumming next door. I came here running and screaming with the ghosts of an old one firmly attached to my back. We own corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day.'Īs he walks, Sepha dwells on the coups of Africa throughout the last century, including the Communist changeover in Ethiopia that sent him fleeing: 'I did not come to America to find a better life. We live in the shadows of every neighborhood. Rather, 'there are those of us who wake only because we have to.

No hard-working immigrant struggling for success is he. (At least then he had his youth.) Over the course of the novel we come to appreciate his perseverance. After 17 years, Sepha has less even than when he arrived. Riverhead Books, 228 pp, $28.50, hardcoverĭinaw Mengestu named his first novel for a passage from Dante's Inferno: 'I beheld through a round aperture/Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear /Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.' The lines speak to the poet's 'return to the bright world' from hell, and to an optimism notable for its absence from Mengestu's moving, sad book.īeautiful Things concerns Sepha Stephanos, an immigrant from Ethiopia now running a shabby corner store in a dodgy part of D.C.

The beautiful things that heaven bears by dinaw mengestu