"My guide and I came on that hidden road
to make our way back into the bright world;
and with no care for any rest, we climbed
he first, I following until I saw,
through a round opening, some of those things
of beauty Heaven bears. It was from there
that we emerged, to see once more the stars."

The Divine Comedy - Inferno Canto XXXIV by Dante Alighieri;  translated by Allen Mandelbaum

I’ve just finished reading the novel The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu.
It’s the story of an Ethiopian immigrant, Sepha, who escaped from his country after the murder of his father in the hands of the Revolutionary Army. Once in the United States, he opens a small grocery store in a neighborhood of Washington DC where he survives his exile.
Together with his friends, Joseph from Congo and Kenneth from Kenya they play and joke about the dictators of Africa and watch the neighborhood and its people change over time while they give up all aspirations of happiness and progress. Sepha is trapped between the past that he can’t leave behind and the future that never comes. He has visions of what his life can be, but he never finishes the reconciliation with his past.
We would like to give him a push to take him out of that "in-between" but we are only witnesses of his inaction.
This is a novel that left me with a bitter sweet taste. Its mayor achievement is to portrait very well the life of the immigrant. Those experiences that people who left their country looking for a better future or to escape persecution, can only understand.
As time goes by, the one that leaves his country behind ends up being a man without a land. He will never totally belong to the new country and he doesn’t belong to the one he left behind anymore, he is an alien everywhere.
And to that he has to add the fact that not all his dreams become true and he ends up enduring time as best as he can. 

I come from a country of immigrants, and I’m one myself. I grew up watching those Sephas sit behind a counter, coming from all over the world trying to forge a future in a new country but always tied to what they left.

The title of the novel is inspired by a paragraph of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri in the moment when they leave the Inferno and they get a glance of Heaven. 
The author of The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengestu, is an Ethiopian that fled his country with his mother when he was only two years old.

AliciA