The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Discussion Questions
1. Sepha Stephanos meets regularly with his friends Kenneth and Joseph.
What brings and keeps these three together?
What dominates their conversations?
2. How do these men view Africa and America, their new home?
How do their stories speak to the larger experience of immigrants in America?
3. How does Sepha’s life change once he meets Judith and Naomi?
4. How does the gentrification of Logan’s Circle affect Sepha’s business and his
personal life?
5. Sepha enters his uncle Berhane’s apartment and opens a lockbox containing letters and money.
What is the intention of his visit and what does he discover there?
6. How does the memory of his father and the way he died affect the man that Sepha has become?
7. When Joseph sees the brick that was thrown at the front of Sepha’s store, he holds it aloft and says, “There’s a great metaphor in this.”
What do you think of this and other metaphors in the book?
8. Sepha comments, “We were always more comfortable with the world’s tragedies than our own.”
What can we, as readers, learn from the suffering and hardship we encounter in Mengestu’s book?
9. What is the significance of the works of literature, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mentioned in the book?
10. How do you read the book’s ending?
What do you think will happen to Sepha, his store, and the neighborhood?
11. The British title of this book is Children of the Revolution (from a 1972 song by T. Rex), whereas the American title comes from a line in Dante’s Inferno.
How does each title change your perspective on the book?
1 comment:
Great discussion questions, I'll look back at it as soon as I've read the book, which is on my reading list.
I just wanted to recommend you this link. It's about an Ethiopian-Italian writer and the shows she held in the USA. Her first book, "Regina di fiori e di perle" (2007) hasn't been translated into English yet, but I hope it will. It opens a window on the experience of Ethiopian expatriates in Italy and on the forgotten (in Italy!) invasion of Ethiopia during fascism.
http://www.africantribune.com/content/view/2840/181/
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