Beautifully written, but not an entirely compelling story for me.

books:

	• The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Dinaw Mengestu Riverhead Trade, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A captivating read!

This is a beautifully written book, which affords those of us who are born Americans insight into the thoughts, feelings and perspectives of immigrants, who are exiled forever from their native countries and who strive to find meaningful lives in this country of seeming opportunity and undeniable contradiction. I loved it!

Beautifully written, but not an entirely compelling story for me.

I admit right off to having problems staying engaged in this story. This novel is written in a beautiful style, but I just had a hard time relating to the narrator. I felt I really never got to know him. I recently read Cutting for Stone, and I loved that story, and immediately was happy about the Ethiopian connection in this book. But the relationships and the story just fell short for me.

Sepha is an Ethiopian immigrant who is given the gift of escaping a bloody regime that murdered his father in Addis Ababa. He now resides in a small apartment in a run down part of Washington DC. His dream of becoming a successful shop keeper (and by default, part of a community) is thwarted by his own indifference and homesickness. He dwells on the past and lives a quiet life, until he meets his new neighbor Judith, and her daughter, Naomi.

Sepha has friends and acquaintances who care for him. But his true connection comes with the intellectual and mysterious Judith and her precocious 11 year old daughter, Naomi. He is temporarily brought to life by these women. His connections to his African past, his friends Kenneth and Joseph seem to depress him and unwittingly taunt him.

This novel is not a happy one, in my opinion,. It is filled with disappointment and grief. Much has been lost by so many in this book, especially the main character of course. Perhaps the connection to Dante is that he and his neighbors on Logan Circle (as in circle of hell, of course) are trapped in their own kind of hell, like Dante's, and the book seems to end appropriately. this isn't a long novel, and the writing is superb, but it was a painful, sad read.

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Interesting Immigrant Tale

Another great, young writer. I look forward to reading more from him. I liked this book very much. His writing is just so lovely, heartbraking. I loved it being in D.C., eye-popping realism. Just so immediate and real. A lot of warmth in this writing.

Real life can be a downer.

Very good writing style and I learned some interesting things about the protagonists culture. It's a sad story of not living a life fully in the midst of loss of family and country. Understandable, believable, very readable and mildly depressing. I see the unfulfilled life all around me, I prefer to read stories that are rich, well written and share the real human condition but allow me to see hope and redemption in them as well.

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A little too subtle in places

"The beautiful things that heaven bears" is a line from a passage in Dante's Inferno, in which Dante is emerging from hell. According to one of the characters in the book, "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." The passage is definitely a metaphor for Sepha's story, whose existence seems to be just one long, endless trudge through life. I enjoy books like this that give me a glimpse of life in a different culture than my own, but I think that in some ways this book is a little too subtle. For example, when the "series of racial incidents disturbs the community", I wouldn't have known they were racial incidents if the back of the book hadn't said so. They could just as easily been class-based as race-based. Also, the pacing of the story was difficult for me to follow. The story jumps back and forth in time, and once in a while I would lose track of where I was in the timeline. I think I would have enjoyed learning more about the culture than just about Sepha. Overall, this was a well-written novel, but it left me wanting more -- or maybe, just something different.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

A literary debut hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a great American novel." Awards Include:
Finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
Winner of the Guardian First Book Prize
New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the National Book Foundation's ?5 Under 35? Award
Recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship
Winner of the Prix du Premier Roman
Named the Seattle Reads Selection of 2008

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

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