The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu, 2007
Penguin Group USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594482854
Summary
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.
Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors—Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter—who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration that casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha's eyes, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country—and what it takes to create a new home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Addis Ababa, Ethiopa
• Raised—USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A., Columbia
University
• Awards— (see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he and his family came to the United States. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, he lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
Awards
Guardian First Book Award: Winner 2007
National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" Award
New York Times Notable Book
Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlist
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Lannan Literary Fellowship
Prix du Premier Roman
Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist
NAACP Image Award Finalist
(From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Again and again, Stephanos’s story makes us consider what it means to be displaced: from a local community, from a distant nation, from a love you had hoped to settle into. In Mengestu’s work, there’s no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with “truthiness” — and Washington may be the capital of that — there’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.
Rob Nixon - New York Times
With its well-observed characters and brisk narrative pacing, greatly benefited by the characters' tension-laced wit, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is an assured literary debut by a writer worth watching.
Washington Post Book World
[W]renching and important...Seldom has a character emerged in a recent novel who is so compellingly dark but honest, hopeful but dismal, and able to turn his chronicle into a truly American tapestry...Mengestu has made, and made well, a novel that is a retelling of the immigrant experience.
Chris Albani - Los Angeles Times
That "friendship" between the United States and Ethiopia, which was solidified when Ethiopia became a founding member of the League of Nations and later the United Nations, has long since been betrayed by the Cold War and oil politics abroad. Yet, as Mengestu closely observes the human face of that betrayal, as it plays out amid the racism and class politics of Washington, D.C., he gives us another chance to understand the Ethiopian American experience, in a deeply felt novel that deserves to be read.
San Francisco Chronicle
This first novel, by an Ethiopian-American, sings of the immigrant experience, an old American story that people renew every generation, but it sings in an existential key.... His straightforward language and his low-key voice combine to make a compelling narrative, one that loops back in time yet seems to move forward with an even pace
Alan Cheuse - Dallas Morning News
Barely suppressed despair and black wit infuse this beautifully observed debut from Ethiopian migr Mengestu. Set over eight months in a gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhood in the 1970s, it captures an uptick in Ethiopian grocery store owner Sepha Stephanos's long-deferred hopes, as Judith, a white academic, fixes up the four-story house next to his apartment building, treats him to dinner and lets him steal a kiss. Just as unexpected is Sepha's friendship with Judith's biracial 11-year-old daughter, Naomi (one of the book's most vivid characters), over a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Mengestu adds chiaroscuro with the story of Stephanos's 17-year exile from his family and country following his father's murder by revolutionary soldiers. After long days in the dusty, barely profitable shop, Sepha's two friends, Joseph from Congo and Kenneth from Kenya, joke with Sepha about African dictators and gently mock his romantic aspirations, while the neighborhood's loaded racial politics hang over Sepha and Judith's burgeoning relationship like a sword of Damocles. The novel's dirge-like tone may put off readers looking for the next Kite Runner, but Mengestu's assured prose and haunting set pieces (especially a series of letters from Stephanos's uncle to Jimmy Carter, pleading that he respects "the deep friendship between our two countries") are heart-rending and indelible.
Publishers Weekly
Sometimes the American Dream isn't all one imagines it to be. Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution as a teenager, having seen his father beaten and removed from the family home. Now, nearly two decades later, he owns the local grocery in a changing Washington, DC, neighborhood. Evenings are spend with his first friends in America, also African immigrants, who quiz one another on African revolutionary trivia. His poor African American neighbors have always kept his store afloat, but now he sees a chance for riches as successful professionals begin buying up the decrepit buildings in the neighborhood and returning them to their earlier splendor. When he befriends his new neighbors, a white professor and her biracial daughter, Sepha begins to realize how much he has missed any connection with family. But the neighborhoods revitalization doesn't help its original inhabitants—rents are rising, old timers are being evicted so that their buildings can be rehabbed, and Sepha is now in danger of losing his store. It's a poignant story providing food for thought for those concerned with poverty and immigration. First novelist Mengestu moved to American with his family as a toddler, fleeing the Ethiopian Revolution. Recommended for public and academic libraries. —Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib.
Library Journal
After 17 years, an Ethiopian immigrant wonders to what extent he has become an American. Every Tuesday evening, three friends meet in the back room of Sepha Stephanos's bedraggled Logan Circle convenience store to drink, give advice and wax philosophical about Africa, their mother continent. The trio-"Ken the Kenyan," "Joe from the Congo" and Sepha, who was so skinny he didn't need a nickname to remind them that he was Ethiopian-met as young hotel clerks when they first arrived in Washington, D.C., but since then, they have taken different paths. Joseph and Kenneth graduated from Georgetown and went on to get higher degrees and well-paying jobs, while Sepha attended community college and then opened his store. As an upscale clientele moves into the predominantly lower-class African-American neighborhood, Sepha's business dwindles. With the changes, though, comes Judith, a wealthy white woman, and Naomi, her enchanting biracial daughter. Naomi and Sepha strike up an unlikely friendship, and he spends evenings in the empty store with her, reading Dostoevsky. Judith begins to join them, and she and Sepha dance around the possibility of a romantic relationship. As racial tensions grow in the neighborhood, Sepha wonders if he will be able to woo Judith. But around the holidays, she suddenly leaves her house and sends Naomi to boarding school. Alone again, Sepha recalls his childhood in Addis Ababa, where, as a member of the upper class, he'd had high hopes for a different kind of life, before he witnessed his father's murder and fled the country. Mengestu skirts immigrant-literature cliches and paints a beautiful portrait of a complex, conflicted man struggling with questions of love and loyalty. A nuanced slice of immigrant life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Mengestu opens the novel with Sepha and his friends, Joseph and Kenneth, and the game that they play matching African coups with dictators and dates. The three come from different parts of Africa, and have left different places and people to be in the US. Why do they play this game? How does it affect their relationships with each other? With the country they now call home? With the continent they left behind? Though they are close friends with a long history, why do you think that Joseph reacts the way that he does when Sepha appears at the restaurant? What about Kenneth’s attempts to help Sepha figure out a way to keep from losing the store? How do their differences help or hinder the narrative?
2. In recalling his uncle’s questioning why he had “chosen to open a corner store in a poor black neighborhood,” Sepha says that he had “never said it was because all I wanted...was to read quietly, and alone, for as much of the day as possible.” Books play a huge role in Sepha’s life as well as in the action of the Mengestu’s story. Did you feel that a particular literary reference gave you a glimpse into Sepha’s character that was unexpected or surprising? Which one and why? Or if not, why not?
3. Gentrification, class struggle, and ideas of democracy reverberate as prevailing themes in the novel. How does Mengestu weave these themes into the Sepha’s interactions with Judith and Naomi? The race/class based polarization of Logan Circle? Judith’s career?
4. As we learn in the novel, its title comes from a passage in Dante’s Inferno that Joseph believes to be “the most perfect lines of poetry ever written.” Why do you think Mengestu chose the title The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears? What parallels do you see between Sepha’s story and Dante’s?
5. Speaking of books, reading The Brothers Karamazov together becomes a way for Naomi and Sepha to relate to each other, regardless of their age and implied class differences. Why do you think he highlighted his favorite passage (below) for Naomi, the one he memorized and “read out loud to the shelves and empty aisles,” writing “Remember This” in the margins of his copy of the book?
People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometimes be the means of saving us.
Do you think it is an attempt on Sepha’s part to tell her some of his own story through another’s words? Why or why not?
6. When he goes shopping for Christmas presents, Sepha strolls optimistically throughout the city, finally feeling he has “the beginnings of a life” in America. This optimism is shattered when he finds that Judith and Naomi have left the city for the holidays. Why do you think Sepha’s optimism depends on having Judith and Naomi close? Are they the source of his optimistic feeling? Why or why not? What about his thoughts that end the novel? Why, despite everything, does the store “look more perfect than ever”? How do you think his relationships with Judith and Naomi might have changed his outlook? How might they have changed his relationship to America?
7. How does death affect the Birdswell family? How does Herbert’s death affect them? Roger’s death? The deaths of their childhood? Why do they continue to be haunted by the ghosts of their past? In what ways does each of these deaths change them?
8. Although Sepha has been in the U.S. for seventeen years, he still seems stuck between America and Ethiopia. Though he mentions going back to visit his mother and brother—even at one point thinking of abandoning everything in America to return—he asks himself towards the end of the novel, “How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return?” In an interview, Mengestu theorizes that Sepha will never return to Ethiopia despite his yearnings because “nostalgia and memory are all he has.” Do you agree? Why do you think he has stayed? Why has he never gone back?
9. Letters appear frequently in the novel: His uncle Berhane’s letters to various politicians, Sepha’s letter to Judith, Naomi’s letter to him. How does Mengestu use letters to further our understanding of those characters in the novel who write and receive them? Though we never meet him except through his letters, what do Berhane’s letters reveal that might not have been portrayed through a conversation or letter correspondence between Sepha and his uncle? How does Berhane contrast with the other African immigrants in the novel, namely Kenneth and Joseph? Why do you think that Sepha never wrote back to Naomi?
10. What is the significance of Mengestu’s choice to set the story in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.? Do you feel that the city is a character itself?
11. Were you surprised to find that the brick thrown through Judith’s windshield and at Sepha’s store, as well as the fire that destroyed her house, were the acts of one man as opposed to a group of angry citizens ignited by the evictions? How did you feel about the violence that was directed at Judith and Naomi? About her reaction? What do you think will happen to Logan Circle? To Sepha’s shop? To Sepha himself?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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