The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
Gentle in tone and intimate in its focus, this is exactly the sort of book I was hoping it would be when I suggested it as a possibility for my book group. Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, has just two friends, Kenneth (from Kenya) and Joseph (from Congo/Zaire), and spends his days alone reading in his rundown convenience store in a poor neighborhood in Washington, DC. The neighborhood is beginning to be gentrified, and Sepha is befriended by a white incomer, Judith (a professor of American history), and Judith's eleven-year-old biracial daughter Naomi. Sepha's story--the reason for his lonely solitude--unfolds through after-work conversations he has with Kenneth and Joseph, through his reading sessions with Naomi (they're working on The Brothers Karamazov, which Naomi picked at random for its heft), and somewhat awkward meals with Judith. All the characters are intensely likable and sympathetic, including those present only in Sepha's recollection, such as his gentle, storytelling father, who was a lawyer, or Sepha's uncle, who abandoned the magnificent house he had built when he realized revolution was coming, and who has sent letters to every US president, pleading on Ethiopia's behalf, since his arrival in the United States in the 1970s.I couldn't stop marking passages down for their beauty and the way they moved me. At one point, Sepha leaves his shop in the middle of the day to follow a happy-seeming tourist couple who had dropped in to buy something. He looks back at his shop:I can see it clearly from here, everything from the sagging right gutter to the streaks of blue paint along the side to the metal bars over the windows shining in the sun. How is it that in all these years, I've never seen my store look quite like this? I can imagine it wanting to be spared the burden of having to survive another year. The door is unlocked. The sign is flipped to "Open" and the cash register, with its contents totalling $3.28, is ajar. I wonder if this is what it feels like to walk out on your wife and children. If this is what it feels like to leave a car on the side of the highway and never come back for it. What is the proper equation, the perfect simile or metaphor? I'm an immigrant. I should know this. I've done it before.Ahh, it just hit me in the chest, not in a gratuitous way, but in a true way. I--who am not an immigrant, who did not witness horrors visited on a loved one or lose family in a revolution, who do not live in a poor urban neighborhood, who share with him only a melancholic nature--identified with him viscerally and completely: it's down to the power of Mengestu's writing.A matter-of fact sadness is at the core of the book, and yet it's never lugubrious or soppy or overwrought; there's plenty of understated humor: "It's nice to think there's a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything [in one's life] in one direction," remarks Judith, "but that's not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives. How did you get to own a grocery store?" To which Sepha replies, "Some people are just lucky." Sepha's time reading with Naomi is wonderful. About it, he thinks,Every time I looked at her I became aware of just how seemingly perfect this time was. I thought about how years from now I would remember this with a crushing, heartbreaking nostalgia, because of course I knew even then that I would eventually find myself standing here alone. And just as that knowledge would threaten to destroy the scene, Naomi would do something small, like turn the page to early or shift in her chair, and I would be happy once again.Isn't that the secret to the sadness and joy of life, right there? It hit me with the force of its truth. When Sepha reads, he recalls his father's stories:The stories he invented himself he told with particular delight. They all began the same way, with the same lighthearted tone, with a small wave of the hand, as if the world were being brushed to the side, which I suppose for him it actually was."Ah, that reminds me, Did I tell you about--The shepherd who beat his sheep too hardThe farmer who was too lazy to plow his fieldsThe hyena who laughed himself to deathThe lion who tried to steal the monkey's dinnerThe monkey who tried to steal the lion's dinner?"Yes, we meet the father this way, casually, through affectionate memories--which makes the crucial scene in the center of the book all the more devastating. Devastating, but not gratuitous, not unbearable. Let me leave you with one more quote, from when the number of evictions in Sepha's neighborhood has started to rise. He walks by one of the homes:It didn't matter where you lived, or where you came from, or how far you had traveled, somewhere near you someone was on the run.Truth. I loved the book. I loved the characters. I loved the insight. It won't be for everyone: it's very small scale, and it's melancholic--a little too much so for one member of my book group, but absolutely perfect for me. And as I say, there's humor here, and beauty, and love, and the pain is only the natural pain that comes from waking up and finding yourself doomed to be human.
Mediocrity’s Cookbook: A review of Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven BearsBy Rajesh Barnabas(For The Ethiopian American, January 2007)From majestic auspices a middle aged Ethiopian-American shopkeeper negotiates his own desires against the envisioned hopes of his family ancestry or more accurately – his interpretation of their hopes. Sepha Stephanos lives in DC. He moved out of his uncle’s apartment, estranged from the only relative he has in America. His mother and brother still live in Ethiopia. Instruments used to measure the significance of his life are found in the casual acquaintances of Logan Circle and his meditative walks around the Capitol. The setting’s resemblance to Addis sparks a flickering recollection of violent events that tore apart his family and destroyed the kingdom of Ethiopia. Among many themes gently crammed into the short novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a sense of a lost glory recovered or in the least resuscitated, persists. At times wistful, other times with begrudging sarcasm, author Dinaw Mengestu’s characters explore the emotions of first generation immigrants and their reticence to the motherland and any attempt at recreating that world among transplants in America. All three friends – Ken from Kenya, Joe from the Congo, and Sepha from Ethiopia pride themselves in keeping at arms length their own countrymen and customs. Weary of aged emperors, disgusted by pubescent revolutionaries, the thirty-something Sepha consoles his expired ambition with incremental progress. Business at the corner store is okay. “Never good. Never Bad. Simply okay. Could be better. Grateful it’s not worse.” And when Sepha opens his shop on Christmas day, because he has no family near to celebrate with, the silence comforts him. “There were no cars. There were no people on the sidewalk or in the circle. It felt as if the world had been abandoned by the people who had been busy making it and destroying it, and now the only ones left were timid shopkeepers like myself. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, if not for eternity, then at least for a few hours once a year.” Sepha has already seen during childhood the damage that misguided ambition can bring. Not everyone wants to be king or the inventor of Microsoft Windows, yet Sepha’s meditations are of a different micro-cosm, spoken in a softer language, and through a window of his own making. With Taoist temper, the character meanders through the middle of class, ethnicity, and generations attempting to do no more harm, trying to tell his story without being noticed. Sepha’s long introspective walks full of social commentary are reminiscent of the nameless narrator’s in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The plot of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears wanders along stealthily building momentum and only contemplates sprinting. In this, Mengestu has a knack for the non-event, of anticipations, at describing the inner workings of inaction. Stephanos romance with the only white woman on the block is used for symbolism as much as suspense. With characters drawn so engagingly, I caught myself once nervously looking up from the book to see if Judith was around. This is quite a feat-- to make the reader vigilant of their surroundings. Mengestu’s first novel is not a page-turner. It’s a book you have to put down and think about – a window into our own life and the world around. What are we doing? Where is this going? Where are we from? Who cares? Thirty years from now what stories will we look back on? Who will we remember? What does it all matter? However dirty and shattered the window seems sometimes, it’s all we have. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears debates whether we should be okay with that.
What do You think about The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)?
This novel, the first by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in Washington, DC, at the beginning of the 2000’s. It about African immigrants, one in particular, Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian refugee, and the changing city. Sepha runs a small corner grocery store, but after 17 years in the United States, he still hasn’t found his way. He fled his country at the age of 19 after his father was taken away from his home, and killed. His only family member in America, an “uncle” left behind a comfortable life in Ethiopia, and works endless hours as a taxi driver. Ethiopian immigrants, most of who were refugees of military coups, form a large community in the Washington DC area. They seem to be ubiquitous in the taxi business, and as employees in parking garages (I am not sure why). Sepha and his friends, Kenneth from Kenya and Joseph from Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, meet working at a hotel, and their friendship revolves around their common exile, political turmoil at home, and their “Africanness”. Sepha, like his friends, never finds “success” in his new country. The crux of this is Sepha’s feeling summarized in his observation “How was I supposed to live in America, when I had never really left Ethiopia?” Sepha lives in Logan Circle, a Washington DC neighborhood only a little over a mile from the White House. Until the early 2000’s, it was a neighborhood plagued by drugs and prostitution. At the same time, there were many African American residents who had lived there for decades. As the novel opens, a four-story mansion next to Sepha’s apartment, is being renovated. He hears the construction workers commenting on the lavish details such as 4 bathrooms for 2 people, and bookcases with sliding doors. The new resident turns out to be an university professor, a white American woman named Judith, and her 11-year-old daughter Naomi, a product of her broken marriage with an economist from Mauritania. Sepha becomes close to Naomi, who visits him most days in his market, and is confused about Judith, who seems to want to be close, but is always giving mixed signals.Sepha has never invested the time and energy in his market to make it a success. He struggles with overdue bills, and his market refrigerator is full of expired milk and eggs. Encouraged by his friend Kenneth, he tries different schemes to improve his business, but they come to nought. Sepha struggles with loneliness, and a lack of motivation. He seems rootless in America. At the same time, his neighborhood is changing, and this novel is also a story of gentrification and its impact on residents. Evictions begin, and the efforts to fight the wave of development and incoming well-off newcomers are limited. This is an exceptional first novel, and one that tells multiple stories. The story is well-crafted and occasionally the prose is luminous. It describes a Washington D.C. which is seldom portrayed. Another book that accomplishes this is Edward P. Jones 1992 collection Lost in the City which was nominated for the National Book Award. The title “The beautiful things that heaven bears” is a passage from the last few lines of Dante’s Inferno, just as Dante is preparing to leave Hell. The rest of the phase is“where we came forth and once more saw the stars." For his friend Joseph, this phrase represents the unobtained dreams of Africa, always on the verge of new beginnings which never seem to come to fruition.
—Barbara
Heartbreakingly beautiful! Sepha Stephanos fled Ethiopia after witnessing soldiers beat his father and take him away to certain death. Sepha, Kevin and Joseph are African refugees who have seen the horrors of the many wars, coups and famine in their country. They meet most nights and discuss some of those horrors. "This is how it began then, with the 3 of us sitting in my store on a Thursday night listing for the 100th time the victims of a continent that at times seemed full of nothing else. We were always more comfortable with the world's tragedies then our own. That night was no different - coups, child soldiers, famines were all part of the same package of unending grief that we picked our way through in order to avoid our own frustrations and disappointments with life". The title comes from a line in Dante's Inferno: "Through a round aperture I saw appear some of the beautiful things that heaven bears". Joseph says "I told my teacher that no-one can understand that line like an African because that is what we lived through. Hell every day with only glimpses of heaven in between.
—Shelley
When Sepha Stephanos moves to America to escape the Ethiopian revolution, he expects a country full of opportunity, free of racial persecution, and brimming with people just like him. Now 20 something years later, his expectations have been lowered considerably and he knows better than to expect the best. Running a failing, beaten-down convenient store, Sepha struggles to pay the rent and get through the day. He finds some comfort and solace from his two friends, Joseph and Kenneth, but when Judith moves into the neighborhood with her spunky daughter Naomi, the three form an unlikely bond that leaves Sepha feeling hopeful once more and appreciating the beautiful things that heaven bears. This realistic fiction novel is the compelling story of an immigrant and all that comes along with the title.
—Olivia
