What Is the What by Dave Eggers
Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-torn southern Sudan, fled his town in the middle of the 1980s and later joined the so-called Lost Boys. During his travels, Valentino encounters liberation rebels, hyenas, lions, sicknesses, starvation, and lethal mujahideen (militias on horseback) of the same kind as are today terrorizing Darfur. Eventually, Deng and over 4000 other young Sudanese men are resettled in the US, and a totally different conflict starts. What Is the What, a devastating and fascinating novel loosely based on real events, is full of adventure, intrigue, tragedy, and, in the end, triumph.
What Is the What by Dave Eggers
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The literary king of fictionalized autobiography is Dave Eggers. The first was a dramatized account of Eggers’ own life, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”
His most recent work is “What is the What,” a novel-meets-biography of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who was brought to the US years ago. By using his own voice, Eggers creates his best book to date, a straightforward, gripping account of a real existence.
The story begins in America, where Deng is attending college and working at a Georgia fitness centre. When his apartment is broken into and he is abused one day, he tells the young child watching TV from where he is bound up on the floor, “I would tell them, “You don’t get it. If you knew what I’ve seen, you wouldn’t make me suffer more.”
Deng immerses readers in his own memories of his past life in Sudan, where he was up in a sizable, close-knit polygamous household with many relatives and siblings. All of that changed when Arab militiamen stormed his community, setting homes on fire and killing a large number of the village’s adults.
In a way, Eggers is the perfect writer to document the life of a “Lost Boy” because he has spent most of his writing to the accounts of people who are “lost” or separated from their surroundings. Thus, when asked to write about someone who was actually displaced, he immediately gets into the flow and pushes forward.
And the end product is amazing. No staring inward. No wistful reflection. There is only Deng’s narrative, neatly encased in Eggers’ writing.
In lieu of a hilarious, dark, stranger-in-a-strange-land narrative that is drenched in a sense of homesickness, melancholy, and loneliness, Eggers has stripped his writing of its trappings.
The terrifying journey across the desert, as well as the last pages detailing Deng’s inner thoughts, are among Eggers’ best pieces of writing. His style is smoother and more forceful than ever.
Given that Deng is a real, living person, it is a little difficult to truly depict him in this book. However, through Eggers’ writing, he appears as a bereaved, scarred guy who is nonetheless optimistic about a better life. It’s so captivating that one wonders if a fictional character could ever have jumped off the pages in such a way.
