Indelible Images of a Place Unseen

Still, he haunted the writer's childhood.

"My father would speak about his brother every once in a while, just really quietly," he says. "He would whisper his name while he was driving. Sometimes he would just suddenly shake his head in sadness."

Meanwhile -- how did I end up here? -- Mengestu was trying to figure out who he was.

In high school, "I wanted an identity so badly," he says. "I was never going to be black enough. I was in an all-white Catholic school." There had to be something, he thought, that you could "carve and create for yourself."

The answer was Ethiopia.

He started to read everything he could get his hands on, "doing just weird research into the country on my own." Latching onto Ethiopia was "sentimental," he says, yet there was also an attachment that felt real. The re-connection helped him. "And then it was a matter of building it up over the course of 10 years."

As a Georgetown senior, he began taping interviews with family members -- pressing his father to talk about, among other things, his uncle's death. His uncle was likely taken from his law office, not his home. He was held at a military barracks in Addis Ababa. A week or so later, Mengestu's father got a call to come get him.

"I think they said he had died of pneumonia in prison," Mengestu says. "When my father went to pick up the body, he said he remembers him being bruised and beaten, and his face was swollen."

His father and other relatives seemed "really moved" to talk about this, Mengestu says. "I think most of them hadn't spoken about it in years." As for Mengestu himself: He just wanted the story to be preserved.

He was thinking of writing a nonfiction version, maybe something splicing his interviews together with newspaper articles and historical artifacts into "this crazy postmodern narrative." Instead, he wrote "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears." The title comes from Dante's "Inferno," at a point where the poet is about to leave Hell and -- like an emigrant, with the ordeal of purgatory still ahead of him -- catches a glimpse of the stars.

Mengestu is about to launch a nine-city book tour -- hardly the norm for an unknown first novelist. His editor, Megan Lynch, says interest among booksellers was high enough for Riverhead to go back to press a couple of times even before today's official publication date.

What's next? There will likely be some journalism, he says: Rolling Stone sent him to Darfur for a piece that ran in September, and he came home dreaming terrible dreams but "dying to go back." He also, finally, traveled to Ethiopia. There, he felt whole and "very happy," and he considered nonfiction, once again, as a way to tell that tale.

But who he is now is a novelist, it seems.

"It will definitely end up as fiction," Dinaw Mengestu says.