Book Review: What is the What by Dave Eggers

What is the What by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s San Francisco, 2006. 475 pp.

While there are many things wrong with this novel, in the end I was glad that I read it and I recommend it to anyone who knows people who have emigrated from Africa.
First of all, notice the title, the punctuation is wrong. But that just clues me in a to few things. It is written by a member of a different generation. In many instances, it has the tenor of a reality television show, especially in the beginning when it reads like the crime reports on the local evening news of a large city. The protagonist, Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from Sudan, has been attacked and beaten in his apartment in Atlanta. I almost put the book down multiple times during the first hundred pages.

The novel is written by Dave Eggers but the full title is What is the What The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Valentino Achak Deng is a Lost Boy of Sudan. I didn’t know who the lost boys are, so I went to the internet before finishing the first chapter and looked up both the author and the lost boys of Sudan.

The boys were caught up in Sudan’s civil war in the 1990s. As boys, all pre-adolescents, their towns were attacked and they fled their villages in all directions becoming separated from their families. They congregated and were led by older, but still young men who lead them on foot to the Ethiopian border where they crossed the Gilo River into relative safety. On the way they faced starvation, attacks by lions and soldiers and many of the boys died and were buried by their peers. The suffering is painful to read, it was hard to bear and hard to believe that it was actually real. The internet revealed that some of the Lost Boys of Sudan were indeed resettled in the U.S. and were trying to assimilate into our culture, get an education and had hopes of returning to Sudan to rebuild it. The approach of the novel, of Valentino telling his story in his head (because he was gagged), after he was robbed and beaten, to a boy who was his age when he was separated from his family, is a sad commentary on the great hope of the United States as a place of equal opportunity for all.

In the beginning of the book, I was outraged as a reader. The style was overly graphic and horrific. I felt my emotions were being manipulated. I alternated between reading this book and a Dick Francis mystery novel because I couldn’t bear the horror. I thought of not finishing the book many times. As I got to book II, I realized that I was reading history that I had missed because I was engulfed in family rearing, maintaining my career and I had chosen not to read the details in the newspaper. This civil war is independent of Darfur, I’m pretty sure, yet the subject of the battle, is I believe, over oil in Sudan.

In the end, I have to recommend this book. It is an historical novel. The style is more journalistic than a work of fiction that will be read for a long time. There are scenes that read like the living hell described in The Divine Comedy. The stories of immigrants experiencing our culture for the first time are poignant and sometimes humorous. The character development is pretty good, there are scenes that are described with excellent imagery, and I eventually found a few places where I could laugh. But the extremes of the human suffering are difficult to process.

I found myself comparing this to The Kite Runner, and have to say that the Kite Runner is better literature, though I can’t exactly say why, after all, I am a scientist, not a literary critic.

The theme of What is the What refers to the courage that it takes to go after something that is unknown and intangible. It is only those who are very resilient, lucky and courageous who can survive the devastation of war and famine. It was going to the U.S. that represented Valentino selecting the What, when he really wanted to go back to his village and help his family rebuild it.

If you work with someone who has immigrated to this country during a time of war, you can probably gain a lot of respect for them if you ask them about their journey here. The sad thing is that their journey only begins when they get here. There remains the challenge of getting settled, learning our ways, applying to college, getting a job and the challenges of clothing, feeding and keep oneself safe here, in the developed jungle of the U.S.A.