![]() We live in the shadows of every neighborhood. Rather, "there are those of us who wake only because we have to. No hard-working immigrant struggling for success is he. (At least then he had his youth.) Over the course of the novel we come to appreciate his perseverance. After 17 years, Sepha has less even than when he arrived. ![]() Riverhead Books, 228 pp, $28.50, hardcoverĭinaw Mengestu named his first novel for a passage from Dante's Inferno: "I beheld through a round aperture/Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear /Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars." The lines speak to the poet's "return to the bright world" from hell, and to an optimism notable for its absence from Mengestu's moving, sad book.īeautiful Things concerns Sepha Stephanos, an immigrant from Ethiopia now running a shabby corner store in a dodgy part of D.C. ![]()
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