Another novel about exile, tell me you. Yes, again. But since the exile is a powerful literary and that says a lot left on earth, and especially on those who are born and remain attached, do not spoil our pleasure and give a few lines to Beautiful Things door Heaven (2006), American writer of Ethiopian origin Dinaw Mengestu . For if Stephanos, Joseph and Kenneth fled Ethiophie respectively, Congo and Kenya to the United States, not for pleasure. And it's not a coincidence that when they meet at the counter of the small grocery Stephanos, their favorite game is to reel off the litany of despots who have branded the history of the African continent. Regarding Stephanos, precisely, is the revolution of 1974 and the military regime that followed that led him to the U.S. capital. He lives in a black neighborhood and deprived of Washington, where old mansions were abandoned around the statue General Logan's overlooking the shop.
Until the day a woman and her daughter moved into the house next to where Stephanos rents a modest apartment. It will soon have a real knowledge and complicity between him install, Judith and Naomi small, mischievous child and serious at once. It does not need more for them to take all three to make the dream so close and yet intangible, that Stephanos crosses the street and started with them, the single mother and small daughter Metis as a new home. But it is difficult to accept happiness when it comes before him with such apparent ease, and even that was behind so many invisible chains that keep moving forward.
In fact, Stephanos, like Joseph and Kenneth, is suspended in time, frozen in an endless fall. He somehow manages his small grocery store, because we must live it and it still offers a comfortable independence, but no project based on it, nor on anything else. And he sometimes returns to his uncle, who was greeted on his arrival in Ethiopia, to awaken the ghosts of the past. Similarly, his two friends nourish ambitions they seem afraid to reach. One stacked diplomas to finally resolve to ape his boss. The other dream is a poet and rewrote tirelessly towards the same knowing he will never be satisfied.
In this novel smooth and nuanced - the red bricks or fawn dead leaves - Dinaw Mengestu painted with great sensitivity, an array of exile where the colors of past and future blur based in this monochrome, with here and there with fleeting bursts and comforting. Like this passage from The Divine Comedy , Dante, who, describing the output of Hell, gives the book its title: "By a round openings I screws appear / The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears / We advanced and, once again, saw the stars. "
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Original Title: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2006)
of Dinaw Mengestu
Translated from English (United States USA) by Anne Wicke
Albin Michel, 2007
303 p., 21.50 EUR
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