“WHAT IS THE WHAT” by Dave Eggers is the novelized story of Valentino Achak Deng, who is one of the “lost boys of Sudan.” I just finished reading it last night and I loved it. It is a MUST READ for everyone who cares about human rights. Here’s the blurb from the McSweeney’s website.
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.
And from the New York Times’ review by Francine Prose:
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.
I just started to read this book and it is truly amazing. I was skeptical — even though I’m a fan of Dave Eggers — at the idea of a novelized biography. But it works, and is incredibly poignant.
Before I picked this up, I read Marian Fontana’s “A Widow’s Walk,” which I first learned about from your blog several months ago. Talk about poignant…. I had to stop reading it on the subway (where I do most of my reading during my commute to and from midtown Manhattan each day) because I kept bursting into tears every other page or so. I think the fact that I live in Park Slope and negotiate the same landmarks of everyday life as she did made her account particularly heartbreaking to read. We were all reeling from shock after 9-11, but it’s sad to think how many times our paths probably crossed on Seventh Avenue and I had no idea a close neighbor was dealing with such unimaginable grief. I understand that part of the impetus for writing the book was to create a memoir for her son of her husband, their love, and how she coped in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy. I hope she’ll consider writing another memoir in a few years. She’s a wonderful writer, and I think many people will be interested in her continuing story. (I saw in the acknowledgements that you were/are in a writer’s group with her; and I smiled when I noticed that your husband, Hugh, took the author photo. I don’t know any of you, but it does feel like such a one-degree-of-separation world we live in.)
Signed,
“Park Sloper” (of the short-lived Park Sloper blog of a couple of years ago)