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Separated from his family, Valentino Achak Deng becomes a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan. His travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)—the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Based closely on actual experiences, What Is the What is heartrending and astonishing, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.
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Reviews.
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New York Times Book Review
"The Lost Boy"
By Francine Prose
December 24, 2006
When I'm asked about the differences between fiction and nonfiction, I often find myself attempting to answer this simultaneously impossible and obvious question by rattling on about "Huckleberry Finn." One distinction is that a masterpiece like Twain's can make us feel exactly what it was like to live at another time, in another culture; it's easier for the novel than for even the most incisive biography or historical study to make the reader experience the subject from the inside. The liberties and devices of fiction (dialogue, voice, characterization and so forth) enable the writer to take us into the mind and heart of a person not unlike ourselves who talks to us from a distant period and place, and so becomes our guide to its sights and sounds, its sorrows and satisfactions. One reason "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" remains so affecting and so profoundly threatening is that Huck shows us what it meant to grow up in a slave-holding society and learn to navigate its pathologies. Huck compels us to believe him, which means that we are obliged once again to acknowledge that we live in a country in which ordinary citizens actually bought and sold human beings like Jim.
Dave Eggers's "What Is the What" is, like "Huckleberry Finn," a picaresque novel of adolescence. But the injustices, horrors and follies that Huck encounters on his raft trip down the Mississippi would have seemed like glimpses of heaven to Eggers's hero, whose odyssey from his village in the southern Sudan to temporary shelter in Ethiopia to a vast refugee camp in Kenya and finally to Atlanta is a nightmare of chaos and carnage punctuated by periods of relative peace lasting just long enough for him to catch his breath.
The novel's subtitle, "The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng," refers to a real-life Sudanese refugee who informs us in a brief preface that "over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation." We readers are the fortunate beneficiaries of this collaboration. Eggers's generous spirit and seemingly inexhaustible energy—some of the qualities that made his memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," so popular—transform Valentino and the people he met on his journey into characters in a book with the imaginative sweep, the scope and, above all, the emotional power of an epic.
Intense, straightforward, lit by lightning flashes of humor, wisdom and charm, Valentino's story—novel, autobiography, whatever—is an account of what it was like to be one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Ah, the Lost Boys of Sudan, we say. How sad. The phrase has instant name recognition for many Americans who, I suspect, might then need to pause to retrieve the details (if such a retrieval ever occurs) of how and why those boys got lost in the first place. In fact their diaspora began during the second Sudanese civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005 and displaced tens of thousand of children. Driven from their ruined villages, they wandered through a war zone to resettlement camps and, for the lucky ones, to safety. After having read "What Is the What," you no longer need to hesitate and wonder. You know precisely who the boys were because you have experienced their mass migration and the mass murder that occasioned it through the eyes, and in the compelling voice, of Valentino Achak Deng. By the time the members of Eggers's large and youthful fan base have repeatedly consulted the book's map of East Africa, tracing the Lost Boys' wanderings, they will be able to visualize the geographical positions of Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya with a clarity surpassing their possibly hazy recall of anything they might have memorized for a World Civilization class.
The book opens in Atlanta, where Valentino works at a health club and attends a community college—and where, in the first chapter, his apartment is broken into by thugs, thus confirming his growing awareness that violence is not an exclusively East African problem. Bound and gagged, held captive by a boy not much older than he was when his peregrinations began, he recalls his tranquil childhood among the Dinka tribe in the village of Marial Bal. There his most serious quandary involved the question of when to remove the plastic wrapping from a new bicycle, and there too his father, who owned a shop, used to tell the story that gives the novel its title. After God created men and women, according to local legend, he gave them cattle, the source of "milk and meat and prosperity of every kind." But God offered mankind a choice: "You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What."
The pacific Dinka wisely chose the cow. But others picked, and continue to seek, the mysterious, unnamable, destructive and possibly unattainable What. Soon the consequences of that mythic decision come crashing down on the unfortunate Dinka. Rebel soldiers arrive at the village and, while stealing sugar from the shop, severely beat our young hero's father. Marial Bal becomes a battleground, fought over by government and rebel armies; the village is strafed by army helicopters, invaded, burned, occupied. And Achak (who will take the name Valentino only later in his tale) narrowly escapes: "I ran. But I was too loud. When I ran through the grass I seemed to be begging the world to notice me, to devour me. I tried to make my feet lighter but I could not see where I was placing them. It was black everywhere, there was no moon that night, and I had to run with my hands rigid in front of me."
The lyricism, the detail and, most important, the absolute specificity of these sentences are what make "What Is the What" so persuasive. It's a real high-wire act, yet Eggers manages to maintain this level of intensity throughout the book as Achak and the other Lost Boys encounter minefields and massacres, loneliness and fear, starvation, disease, predatory wild animals, the seemingly endless varieties of cruelty, the sustenance of fellowship and the surprising manifestations of instinctive human kindness. What's remarkable is that, given its harrowing subject matter, the book isn't simply horrifying or depressing. The considerable appeal of Valentino's personality and the force of Eggers's talent turn this eyewitness account of a terrible tragedy into a paradoxically pleasurable experience. As with any book we enjoy and admire, we keep turning the pages to find out if everything will turn out all right in the end. And just as in life—I don't think I'm giving away any suspense-ruining plot points here—things do work out for some characters, if not, alas, for others.
Throughout, the narrative is sufficiently elastic to shift back and forth from present to past and sufficiently capacious to include a love story, a coming-of-age novel and Valentino's unfailingly engaging musings on human nature, love and death, as well as the meaning of the eponymous and ominous "What." There is also a good deal of African history, often ingeniously framed as dialogue or as a story shared by one of the boys, yet another effective deployment of fictional technique—in this case, to make us painlessly absorb a hefty dose of (in several senses of the word) hard information.
I suppose some merciless pruning could have reduced "What Is the What" by a few ounces, but by the time you reach its stunning and beautiful conclusion, you can't help feeling that the resonant power of its last lines derives at least in part from the cumulative weight of every word that has gone before.
"Whatever I do," Valentino assures us, "however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. ... I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. ... I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."
Reading "What Is the What" does indeed make it impossible to pretend that Valentino Achak Deng and the other Lost Boys and all the men and women and children who have suffered, and continue to suffer, fates like his do not exist. Dave Eggers has made the outlines of the tragedy in East Africa—so vague to so many Americans—not only sharp and clear but indelible. An eloquent testimony to the power of storytelling, "What Is the What" is an extraordinary work of witness, and of art.
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USA Today
"Fact or Fiction, Eggers' 'What' Lends Humanity, Insight to African Conflict"
By Deirdre Donahue
December 7, 2006
Hands down, Dave Eggers' What Is the What stands as the single most thought-provoking, unusual and moving book I have read all year.
It deserves a wide audience for two reasons. First, it is beautifully written and explores all the deepest aspects of human life: grief, the existence of God, alienation, good and evil, love, friendship.
The second reason people should read What Is the What involves a world bigger than book publishing.
Eggers puts a human face on what is happening in Africa today, specifically in Sudan and the conflict between the Muslim North and the Christian South. (What is not specifically about Darfur, but it helps the reader understand the roots of that conflict.)
In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his 2000 memoir about rearing his little brother after the death of their parents, Eggers established that he is the most interesting young writer working today.
What Is the What confirms and enhances his reputation within the literary world.
Without being a political diatribe, What makes comprehensible the jumble of news stories and TV reports about refugee camps, orphans and boy soldiers. It also examines in detail the complicated and often unnerving experience of being an immigrant to the USA in the 21st century.
The unusual element is contained in the title, subtitle and author credit: What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, "a novel by Dave Eggers." Eggers has written a novel that draws heavily upon the autobiography of a real person, a Sudanese man who was relocated in 2001 from a Kenyan refugee camp to Atlanta.
Eggers and Deng met in 2003. In the preface, Deng explains how the book came together.
Trust me. As weird as this hybrid novel/autobiography sounds, it works. It's not some James Frey-esque truthiness scam. Taking on a role way beyond ghostwriter, Eggers uses his enormous gifts to tell Deng's extraordinary story, adding fictional passages.
Born in a village in southern Sudan, Deng was the cherished son of a comfortable storekeeper from the Dinka tribe. Around 1987, 7-year-old Deng's small, content world was shattered when government helicopters attacked and killed 30 villagers. The village was being punished for the activities of Sudanese rebels.
Deng is soon separated from his family, becoming one of the estimated 17,000 "lost boys of Sudan." Starving, frightened and under attack from raiders and animals, these boys walked first to Ethiopia and later to a refugee camp in Kenya where Deng spent 13 years before being settled in Atlanta. Two and a half million people have died during the Sudanese civil war, but it is the individual deaths of Deng's small friends, little boys carefully described and thus remembered, that give the book its power.
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Seattle Times
"Eggers' Heartbreaking New Novel Has Clarity of a Documentary"
By Michael Upchurch
December 1, 2006
There is something distinctive about the voice, something that catches you a little off-guard, in the book's very first sentence: "I have no reason not to open the door so I open the door."
The doors both actual and imaginative that spring open in Dave Eggers' "What Is the What" lead into territory few American readers will be familiar with. And the voice of the book is a revelation, too.
It is decidedly not the voice of novelist-memoirist Eggers ("A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"). Instead, it belongs to a southern Sudanese boy, forced to flee his village when only 6 or 7 years old, after his people, the Christian Dinka, are attacked by soldiers of the Islamist government of Khartoum and its tribal allies.
Separated from his parents in the confusion of battle, the boy wanders alone until he joins a band of youngsters fleeing to Ethiopia—one of many bands of "Lost Boys" who, in the early 1980s, crossed hundreds of miles of hostile territory, seeking some kind of safety and sanctuary.
Achak Nyibek Arou Deng (he picked up the "Valentino" later, along with several other nicknames) grew up parentless in refugee camps in Ethiopia and northern Kenya over the next 15 years. Through a U.N. program he was brought to the U.S. when in his early 20s (like many of the Lost Boys, he's uncertain of his exact age).
In Atlanta, he tried to pursue his dream of getting a college education, with the idea of eventually bringing some of the benefit of his luck back to Sudan with him.
But his luck ran bad as often as it ran good. When he opens that door in the book's opening chapter, for instance, he lets himself in for a brutal robbery by an African-American couple who have the nerve to call him "brother" and to advise him: "Don't you know you shouldn't open your door to strangers?"
Yet what option does he have but to open it, when for years the only mode of survival he has known has been leap after leap into the dark, into the unknown?
"What Is the What" is the product of a years-long collaboration between Eggers and Deng, in which Deng gave an oral account of his life to Eggers and Eggers "concocted" a novel from it. As Deng writes in his brief preface to the book, the novel uses the basic events of his life as its "foundation" but also draws on other research Eggers did, including the stories of other refugees.
Eggers may be using docu-drama methods here, but the book sings like a novel—a novel in which every phrase falls with exquisite, revealing precision and the themes of the story play out as satisfyingly as in a large-scale symphony.
The narrative shifts back and forth between the present-day Atlanta robbery and Deng's past ordeals, with the personal blow and setback of the robbery getting almost equal weight with the horrors of the Lost Boys' trek out of Sudan.
On that trek, Deng and his friends are the prey not just of soldiers but of lions and crocodiles ("we boys were food"). In the U.S., it's the near-collapse of hope that is the killer. "I am tired of this country," Deng admits early on. "I am thankful for it, yes, I have cherished many aspects of it ... but I am tired of the promises."
To his surprise, he finds himself homesick for Africa: "I miss Sudan, I miss the howling grey desert of northern Kenya. I miss the yellow nothing of Ethiopia."
That last phrase alone suggests why "What Is the What"—the title comes from a Dinka creation myth in which God offers mankind a choice between a known quantity (cattle) and an unknown possibility—is more than just a horror show or dirge. It is, on Eggers' part, an extraordinary act of empathy and poetic imagination.
We've all seen images of refugee camps, those limbos where the victims of war and famine wind up. What few of us have seen or felt is what it's like to grow up in such a place, to see it change over the years, to know its "neighborhoods," to find warmth and camaraderie there as well as deprivation and threat. ("There is a perception in the West," Deng says with biting understatement, "that refugee camps are temporary.")
Throughout the book, a tension is at play between Deng's sense of wonder at all he sees and the numbing losses he suffers. A note of gallows humor about his ordeal ("Yeah, but you're used to it" becomes a shared catch phrase between him and a Japanese aid worker who befriends him) adds an unexpected tonic note to his powerful tale.
Deng, with Eggers as his channeler, clearly intended the telling of his story to be a prompt to action. All proceeds from the novel are going to The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, dedicated to helping Sudanese refugees in America, rebuilding villages in southern Sudan and funding humanitarian aid in Darfur (with some going to the college education Deng is still pursuing).
But for all its informativeness about Sudanese history and the Lost Boys' experiences in both Africa and America (including, peripherally, Seattle), "What Is the What" is equally a work of literary fiction. With its perfect blend of epic sweep and small, intimate moments, it stands worthily alongside the best work of Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri.
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Washington Post
"A Heartbreaking Work of Fiction: In a New Novel, Dave Eggers Tells Sudanese Victim's True Story"
By Bob Thompson
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Here are a few things we can say for sure about Dave Eggers's latest book:
It's not a satire of political correctness in the English department of an elite liberal arts college. No publisher is betting that it will be "the next 'Da Vinci Code.'" Judith Regan had nothing to do with it.
Oh, and it's a safe bet that Eggers didn't consult any marketing types about the title.
He called it "What Is the What."
Which means—
Well, maybe we should save that for later. Because right now the writer best known for his arrestingly titled memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is sitting in a newspaper conference room with Valentino Achak Deng, the Sudanese "Lost Boy" whose life story he's undertaken to tell. And he's talking about one thing readers of "What Is the What" can't say for sure: How much is fact and how much is fiction.
Why the line-blurring? The explanation goes like this: Introduced to Deng in early 2003 and deeply engaged by his story, Eggers set out to write a conventional biography. But he kept getting stuck.
"I didn't know how to do it," he says. "I didn't want my own voice in there."
Despairing, he was ready to give the whole thing up. Then it occurred to him that "all the books that we remember about war and about the biggest events of the 20th century are novels." Think of "The Naked and the Dead," "Catch-22" and "all Hemingway's stuff."
More important, think of the ways fictionalizing Deng's story could solve narrative problems. By labeling the book a novel, Eggers says, he freed himself to re-create conversations, streamline complex relationships, add relevant detail and manipulate time and space in helpful ways—all while maintaining the essential truthfulness of the storytelling.
There was only one hitch.
"I was so afraid to ask Valentino," Eggers says.
Author and subject grin at the memory. Eggers, in a white shirt and a sport coat that's seen better days, is the shorter and more intense-looking of the two. Deng, in a black shirt and jeans, is tall—as the Dinka people tend to be—with a warm, gap-toothed smile.
They call each other "Dave" and "Val," but Eggers, who's 36, has had the luxury of keeping the same name all his life. Deng, who's a decade or so younger, has been known as "Achak" (the name his parents gave him), "Valentino" (a baptismal name), "Dominic" (from a teacher in a refugee camp), "Gone Far" (a nickname alluding to his long trek out of war-wracked Sudan) and, most poetically, "Sleeper"—bestowed by a girl who found him lying in the road one day, half-blind and longing for death.
Here's how Eggers, in Deng's voice, describes the moment:
"I conjured my mother as best I could. I pictured her in yellow, yellow like an evening sun, walking down the path. ... When she came up to me I told her I was too tired to continue, that I would suffer again, and would watch others suffer. ... Then I washed her from my mind. It seemed to me that to die I needed to clear my mind of all thoughts, all visions, and concentrate on passing on."
You look like my dead brother, the girl said. She lifted him up and got him walking again.
Lost Boys is a name attached to thousands of young refugees from the civil war in southern Sudan, which broke out in the mid-1980s and continued until peace was finally negotiated in 2005. "It is not a nickname appreciated by many in our ranks," as Deng the book character puts it, "but it is apt enough."
These days, Deng and the roughly 4,000 other Lost Boys who were resettled in the United States often find themselves confused with victims of more recent savagery in Darfur. But while the atrocities committed by government-backed militiamen have been similar—"the difference is just the name they're using to describe the militia," he says—Darfur is in western Sudan. Marial Bai, the home town from which Deng was driven in fear of his life, is farther south.
His journey began in the mid-'80s, when, as a 6-year-old, he was still young enough "to be weak and melt into his mother's arms." Trouble had been brewing between the African peoples of southern Sudan and the Arab-dominated government in the north. But the boy knew nothing of the complex history behind the conflict.
"I couldn't understand," he says. "There was me in my town, my father was doing well—why do we want to go to war? No reason."
Reason or no, war came.
Arab militiamen on horseback overran Marial Bai. Deng saw his home town burned, his friends and neighbors killed or abducted. Not knowing his parents' fate, he fell in with a group of similarly displaced boys. An adult leader set them walking toward Ethiopia, where they were told they would find a haven, despite having no idea what "an Ethiopia" was.
The horrors of that walk cannot be easily summarized.
In "What Is the What" there are scenes of famished boys ripping the flesh off a dead elephant; of a boy dragging a stick as he walked, "making a line in the dirt so he would know his way home"; of land mines, ravening lions and exhausted, starving "sleepers" who gave up and died along the way.
Once across the border, a refugee camp became a recruiting ground. Rebel leaders told the boys, many destined to become child soldiers, that they were "the seeds of a new Sudan." Driven out, eventually, by the Ethiopians, the boys escaped across the Gilo River in a hail of gunfire—except for those who got shot or were intercepted by crocodiles.
Reaching safety in Kenya, they found themselves trapped in a bleak refugee camp called Kakuma for—in Deng's case—10 years.
How he finally got to the United States is an epic in itself. Being scheduled to fly on Sept. 11, 2001, did not help. Plunked down in Atlanta, he got to know the founder of a nonprofit called the Lost Boys Foundation. Her name was Mary Williams and she came to view him as an especially articulate spokesman for his Lost Boy peers.
One day, he says, Williams asked about his long-term goals. "I would like to be able to document my story," he told her, "in a written form that generations will have access to."
Okay, she said, she'd find somebody to help.
Mary Williams didn't know Dave Eggers, but she'd happened to pick up his memoir once when she needed airplane reading.
"The title was just hilarious," she says.
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is the saga of how, when Eggers was in college, his parents contrived to die of cancer within five weeks of each other, leaving Dave and his sister to raise their 7-year-old brother. The memoir's out-of-nowhere success left Eggers with enough cash to fund a variety of literary and philanthropic projects, among them the tiny independent publishing house McSweeney's and a literary magazine, the Believer, as well as a writing workshop and tutoring center in San Francisco.
Williams read up on Eggers and was impressed. He's "kind of like a Lost Boy himself," she says. So she wrote and asked if he'd like to get involved.
The idea was a long shot at best. How many name-brand authors would drop everything to tell a Lost Boy's story? But Eggers, as it happened, was already intrigued by the long march of the Sudanese refugees.
So he flew to Atlanta to check things out.
He bonded with Deng right away and began taping interviews. Later, they wangled their way onto a plane delivering aid to Sudan—"we sat in the cargo hold with the grain and the bicycles and stuff," Eggers says—to do a little firsthand research. In all, they spent thousands of hours together. It took him that long, he says, "to be able to see through Valentino's eyes."
As for the fiction decision: When Eggers raised the idea, he feared that Deng would angrily reject any re-imagining of his real story. But "right away he was like: What? Do whatever! Do anything you want!"
"Dave is an artist," Deng says. "I'm not only about myself in the book." The idea was to tell the most accessible story possible about the devastation so many had endured.
Back and forth they go, deferring to each other, holding forth on their shared narrative.
They talk about how the original idea was to tell just the African part of Deng's life, until Eggers realized that his subject's struggle to adapt to the United States—and the numerous disasters he has experienced here—had to be part of the story.
They talk about their plan to use profits from the book to fund Deng's education, aid other Sudanese refugees, help rebuild Marial Bai and promote peace and justice in Darfur.
What does the future hold for Deng? Will he stay in his adopted homeland, where he is attending Allegheny College?
"I would like to bring up my kids here," he says. "But then I also, at the same time, want to make differences in Sudan."
"What Is the What" was published by McSweeney's, which allowed Eggers the total freedom he likes but means there's no marketing machine behind the book. Nonetheless, it's picked up some terrific reviews and made it to No. 25 on the New York Times' extended bestseller list this week.
As for that mysterious title: It's taken from a creation story Deng remembers hearing as a child.
God, it seems, made the first Dinka man tall and strong and the first Dinka woman beautiful. When he was done, he offered his creations a gift. "You can either have these cattle," he told them, "or you can have the What."
"What is the What?" they asked. But God refused to answer. The choice was a test. The Dinka could go for the cattle, which they knew would allow them to live well, or they could take a chance on the unknown. They chose the cattle, which, as the story's moral had it, proved the wise thing to do.
Except ...
The stable, solid universe in which that decision made sense is gone. And in the Lost Boy world of strife and stress and endless change that has replaced it, embracing the unknown—as Valentino Achak Deng can tell us better than anyone—looks like the only choice there is.
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Time Out Chicago
By Jonathan Messinger
Issue: November 9–November 15, 2006
At the opening of this fictionalized memoir, Valentino Achak Deng lies on his living-room floor, bloodied and beaten. A man and a woman are robbing him blind, and though his pistol-whipped head is cloudy, one thought persists: This is not the worst of my suffering.
Deng is a flesh-and-blood Lost Boy of Sudan, one of the thousands of refugees who fled the African country after years of civil strife, walking through desert and jungle and eventually landing across the globe. Over the course of several years, Eggers interviewed Deng about his escape and his life in America, and the result is this odd hybrid of the real and unreal. The book is a novel, but it hews closely to real events in Deng's life. In essence, Eggers channels Deng and the horrors suffered by the Lost Boys for 400 pages.
Of course, readers will bring their own caveats to this book. Eggers has built a reputation—for better or for worse—as a good-hearted litera
