The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, is the captivating story of Sepha Stephanos, an immigrant who fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror just after the murder of his father by revolutionaries and – seventeen years later – is struggling to make a new life as the owner of a grocery store in a poor (but gradually changing) neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
He and his two African friends, Joseph, a waiter from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenneth, an engineer from Kenya, spend their free time together, drinking, playing a game of naming all coups and dictators in Africa, sharing feelings of frustration, isolation and nostalgia for their home continent. While Kenneth is determined to reach his own American dream, by taking very seriously his engineering job and Joseph continues to cultivate his intellectual and cultural interests, Sepha finds in Judith – the first white person to move into the neighborhood – and in her biracial daughter Naomi friendship, love and the hope that his life might finally change.
Past and present alternate in the different chapters of the book, building a story of exile, family love and isolation. There are flashbacks of Sepha’s and his family’s life in Ethiopia, of his beginning in DC with Uncle Berhane , of his first job as a waiter with his two friends and of the ups and downs of his grocery store. And then, the final disappointment, when Judith – whose car had been broken in with a brick and whose house was burnt down in a gesture of rebellion against the gentrification of the neighborhood– leaves the area for good.
The story is told with humor and a depth of feeling, which make it a wonderful and captivating reading. The book takes its title from the final verses of Dante’s Inferno, which Joseph declares to be “the most perfect lines of poetry ever written”:
“Through a round aperture I saw appear,
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
When we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
