MADreads

Between heaven and hell=Washington, D.C.

June 9th, 2009 Molly - Central

What are The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears–friendship and love and a chance to start over or loneliness, despair and lost hopes and dreams?  First-time novelist Dinaw Mengestu’s story of an Ethiopian immigrant grocer living in Washington, D.C. quietly draws the reader into the Logan Circle neighborhood that is slowly transitioning from an area of poverty and vice into one filled with gentrified homes owned by professors and lawyers.  What happens to the residents, both old and new, when a neighborhood moves on?

Stephanos flees Addis Ababa after his father’s murder some eighteen years before the start of the novel and opens the Logan Market shortly after that.   Chapters jump from the present day and back throughout the years with Stephanos as an idealistic teenager of privilege in Africa, as a young man with big dreams for his corner store, playing drinking games with his D.C. friends Kenneth from Kenya and Joseph from the Congo, and culminating in a brief (the briefest) romance with the white professor who moves in next door.  All the while, the reader knows that the neighborhood where Stephanos currently resides is in serious trouble, as is he.

Stephanos struggles with leaving his mother and brother behind in Ethiopia, he struggles with being a poor immigrant in America, he struggles with his store, he struggles with love and relationships, and he struggles with what he wants to be and do.  You know how some books stay with you on and on because the characters are written so well, be it inspiring or infuriating?  That is this book for me.

The title of the book comes from a quote from Dante’s Inferno, as Dante emerges from Hell:

Through a round aperture I saw appear,
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.

I’m not sure if the main character Stephanos discovers the beautiful things that Heaven bears upon his own emergence from hell, but there is much beautiful writing to be found here.  And much to discuss.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction