Yong (3/26): The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

After the last two low-hanging fruit, something a little deeper was needed.  This is a beautifully melancholy story about the immigrant experience, like you've never heard before.  From the very first words, you'd never guess this was a thirty-year old Ethiopian-American's first novel, because Mengestu's voice is utterly transparent.  There's no obvious style that intrudes, no effort of crafting words together distracts, just the story to immediately fall into.  And without starting with any sort of bang or attention grab or other cheap ploy, you're immediately immersed in the story from page one, no twenty or seventy pages of descriptives to wade through to set the scene.  I'm still not sure how he managed that.  But he did.

This isn't a happy story.   It's a normal, every-day, some-things-good, lots-of-things-bad story, where amid the gloom of the daily existence that passes for many people's lives, the little bits of occasional beauty glow luminously.  There is no American dream being chased here, only the nightmare of somewhere else that has been fled, and the ghosts of guilt that still haunt.  It reminds me of two friends of mine because the past is Africa, the present a once awful neighborhood in Washington DC that is slowly, painfully gentrifying.  Into Sepha Stephanos' passage of days enters a new neighbor, a white woman and her daughter fixing up the house next door, with whom his occasional awkward interactions bring a ray of hope into his world.