| REVIEW: DINAW MENGESTU, THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS |
We continue, as American readers and writers, to be engaged by the exotic. We’re charmed to read of life in Tuscany or what it was like to grow up in Afghanistan or to be a young woman in Tehran. I used to wonder if I would more easily find an agent if I were telling a story as an Inuit or a Pygmy. As one who has enough trouble writing in her native language, I pick up a book by a non-native writer with some trepidation; although with most of the rest of the world learning English in elementary school, that trepidation is more a facet of the great American ego than anything else…something truly proven by Dinaw Mengestu in his award winning first novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He’s a first-rate writer, and his novel is clear, evocative, and resonant. It’s a novel of place. And misplacement. A novel where geography is a major character. If we’ve not lived Mengestu’s story directly, each of is a descendant of someone who did. I’ve often wondered how my 17 year old grandmother, an orphan from Italy, dared to sail to America, where she knew no one, and I’ve seen the sepia photos of a dapper, well-heeled grandfather who owned a successful business in Austria, but worked the rest of his life as an electrician in the United States. The history of our species is movement, from out of Africa through Asia and across the Bering Strait land bridge to North America. Survival moved most. And in The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, survival is the mover for 16 year old Sepha Stephanos, whose father has been taken away and whose mother tells Sepha, “Run!” Sepha is luckier than many. He has a contact in the United States, an uncle who welcomes and protects him. But for this young man, although his body inhabits the meager apartment and runs the corner store in Logan Park in D.C., a pervasive sense of dislocation will not allow his soul to migrate from the past. It’s only when the experience of mankind is focused down to one individual that we’re forced to meet that experience in the deepest and most instructive way, to contemplate the human psyche in all its toughness and fragility, and to understand a little better the whole of who we are.
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