Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air

In a 2018 speech at the University of Central Florida, Dinaw Mengestu states it was the “absence of stories” and “absence of the lives of family members” that motivated him to write The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Cole “An Interview”). In a separate interview at the same venue, Mengestu says his debut novel is a composite of both fact and fiction where he took factual details from his family and used them as the basis to craft his fiction (Cole “An Interview”). In response to a question concerning what his “novel has to say to all Americans, regardless of ethnic and racial background, about national identity,” Dinaw responded, “I don't know if novels are supposed to say anything. I think they exist to complicate and expand upon our understanding of the world and it is up to the reader to create their personal meaning out of the narrative” (Cole “An Interview”). Mengestu is surely being modest in his assessment that novels have the ability “to complicate and expand” the readers’ engagement with the world. Mengestu delivers a hermeneutic at the intersection of the reader, world, and text and routes it through the epistemological categories of understanding and personal meaning. Readers expand their understanding of the world with the aid of the novel.