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Loading... The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bearsby Dinaw Mengestu
Ethiopia (5) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. It was a treat to read a novel set in the very neighborhood where I live (Logan Circle in Washington, DC), and to receive a fictionalized retelling of some of the gentrification stories that occurred not long before I moved here in 2011. The protagonist is a striving immigrant who burns out on running his neighborhood bodega in the face of isolation and wistfulness, and whose new neighbors bring him a temporary reprieve. As you can imagine, this is not a light read, and overall I think the main characters all had to contend with very hard lives. But the arc of the plot does go interesting places, and makes DC into the only place where these events could occur; it just ends too abruptly. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was published in 2007 and its events take place in the late 1980s, but it registered with me as something I wanted to read when the NEA chose it as a "Big Read" book a few months back. In light of President Trumps's recent outrageous comments about immigrants from certain parts of the world, it could not be more timely, and its focus on gentrification and tensions between different populations in Washington, D.C. has further relevance to me as someone who lives in the D.C. area. Also, I had read Cutting for Stone a couple of months ago, and the two make nice bookends, so to speak, if you're interested in Ethiopia, which I am. Anyway, BESIDES all of that, it is a great book! Mengestu does a lovely job pacing Sepha's story, and showing the reader the many angles of his, and his associates, lives. I even found echoes of themes I've encountered repeatedly in Irish-American literature of the divided nature of immigrant experience. When one's heart is always or often in a different place from one's body, life takes on a wistful tone. Newcomers to this (or probably any) country can see things about it and its people that long-timers often don't, and these things are useful for us to contemplate. When the critique comes in the guise of a fully-developed fictional universe grounded in an actual place and time, it is easier (for me, anyway) to hear and understand than if I were presented with a bullet-pointed screed, but I was likely to be sympathetic from the outset. Although this is probably the most well-known of Dinaw Mengestu's books, and I'm glad I started with it, I now look forward to reading his others. Two reasons why I chose to read this book: 1) It was Seattle Reads' 2008 pick, and 2) a good percentage of my ESL students are from Ethiopia like the main character of the book. Negative reviews from other Goodreads folks claim that 'nothing happens' and that the characters aren't developed. I disagree. Sure, nobody dies or gets married or gets bitten by a vampire; there's neither a tragic ending nor a perfectly happy, resolved one. Plenty of things happen, however small to the reader, to Sepha. He hopes for the attention of a woman, he befriends her daughter, he revisits his guilt of leaving his family/country, he is in perpetual danger of losing his store. It is a book of being in between, in transition. Between countries, homes. Between the bad years and the good years. Meeting people that you hope will stick around but they don't because they were only meant to be in your life for a short time. The book is a glimpse into the experience of an Ethiopian immigrant and a glimpse into the life of an ordinary man who is still in search of his heaven. no reviews | add a review
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HTML: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. Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Now I wish I had skipped it. The writing is good but it amounts to nothing of substance padded with sad incidents that teach nothing and the minutes of the protagonist's day which are entirely wasted - as was my time reading this. ( )