Book Review: The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

Sepha Stephanos, the hero of Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beatiful Things that Heaven Bears, is an immigrant from Ethiopia who owns a run-down grocery store in a run-down neighborhood in Washington D.C. His life in Washington is haunted by his memories of his home in Ethiopa, and especially by his dead father, who was beaten and arrested before his eyes, never to be seen again. Behind his couner, he keeps a copy of a V.S. Naipaul novel (never named, but apparently A Bend in the River) about a shopkeeper in an African country who is caught between two worlds and whose life is turned chaotically upside-down by revolution.

The famous first line of that Naipaul novel states that "the world is what it is." Sepha's Washington is haunted by his memories, colored by his status as an outsider, and distorted by preconceptions about America; it is his psychological struggle to see his new environment as it is and find his place there that is the core of the novel. The novel is about journeys in many ways: the journey out of Ethiopia; Sepha's perambulations around Washington (always accompanied by strong observation and intelligence); and, ultimately, the psychological journey of an immigrant, which continues to take place long after he has arrived in his new country. Of course, in many ways, this immigrant's journey holds a mirror up to American society and allows those of us who are not immigrants to see our surroundings in a new way.

Sepha's neighborhood and store survive in a kind of equilibrium; the people are poor but buy things from his store with enough regularity for him to barely survive. Then this equilibrium is upset by the arrival in his neighborhood of a wealthy white woman, Judith, and her daughter, Naomi. This arrival heralds the gentrification of the neighborhood, and is itself a kind of revolution. In this setting, Sepha's journey to the house a couple of doors away also seems to be a daunting journey across a great distance, albeit cultural and psychological rather than physical.

The novel is beautifully written, with deftly described characters and a strong sense of physical place as well as social context. I highly recommend this novel to Kindle owners (and readers in general). The Kindle price is $9.99.