The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears – By Dionaw Mengestu

A nice, sad, poignant novel, that tells the story of an immigrant from Ethiopia. I was sorry for it to end, so I must have liked it.

The title of the book comes from a quote from Dante Alighieri's, "Inferno"

“To get back up to the shining world from there

My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel,

And Following its path, we took no care

To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-so far,

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.”

The book shares the interior life of immigrant and store owner Sepha Stephanos who came to America to escape the violent revolution in his home country. He explores the hopes, dreams others have for him and he has for himself. The pull of the world and people he knew and always feeling as an outsider in the new world he inhabits. His relationship with a wealthy white woman and her daughter in their gentrifying neighborhood, and his store,  are interposed and intertwined with the experience of an African Immigrant in America.  What I liked most about the book, is that it touches on the full gamut of real emotions, whether admitted or not. We see the way his mind works, the secrets he keeps, and the realization of how we understand events over time to be different.  

Emblematic of their life journey, his friend is writing an epic poem about Africa that is never finished. Forced out due to violence, with hopes and dreams and a feeling of obligation, that sometimes makes it  seem their life is not their own. The ending of one of the poems is

“We have come this far,

to find we have even further to go

The last traces of a permanent twilight

have faded and given way

To what we hope is nothing short of a permanent dawn.”

And eventually that is boiled down to

“Let us stop. Let us begin again.

Let us clean the blood from the rubber fields

And do what we promised to do.”

The story shows the journey through life and his realization of his realizations for better and worse.

“We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find whats waiting for us now that we’ve returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moment like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made”

It is a good reminder to focus on what kind of life we are making. Life is ongoing.