Product Description

What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #667 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-09
• Released on: 2007-10-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Gary Krist "God has a problem with me," complains Valentino Achak Deng, the subject of Dave Eggers's extraordinary new novel, What Is the What. Coming from almost any other person on the planet, this lament would appear hopelessly self-pitying. But coming from Valentino, a Sudanese refugee, it sounds almost like an understatement. At a time when the field of autobiography seems dominated by hyperbolic accounts of what might be called dramas of privilege (substance abuse, eating disorders, unloving parents, etc.), What Is the What is a story of real global catastrophe -- a work of such simple power, straightforward emotion and genuine gravitas that it reminds us how memoirs can transcend the personal to illuminate large, public tragedies as well.

The book does this despite being, strictly speaking, a novel. Valentino, who survived almost 15 years of civil war and refugee-camp exile before coming to the United States in 2001, in fact does exist, but the book that purports to be his autobiography is actually a fictional recreation by Eggers. No secret is made of the fact that some of the characters in the book are composites, some episodes are invented, and much of the storyline has been reordered and reshaped for narrative effect. The result, however, is a document that -- unlike so many "real" autobiographies -- exudes authenticity.

The secret of the book's credibility lies in its author's success at excising his own oversized personality from the narrative. The voice of What Is the What -- sincere, articulate (if somewhat stilted) and immensely appealing -- has been distilled from countless hours of conversation with the real Valentino, and it bears no trace of the media-savvy postmodern ironist who wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity! Such literary impersonations are not easy to perform convincingly, but aside from noticing the occasional over-sophisticated turn of phrase, I was utterly convinced by the Sudanese refugee who speaks to us in these pages.

The story Valentino tells is harrowing. Anyone who has read the newspapers carefully will know the basic outline of the crisis in Sudan in the 1980s and '90s, when an Islamist government in the capital of Khartoum attempted to subjugate Christian and animist rebels from the south. But Eggers gives this history real immediacy by filtering it through the subjective experience of a single individual. Valentino is just 7 years old when his Dinka village of Marial Bai is raided by a gang of government-supported Arab militiamen. He is able to elude the marauding horsemen, but he can only watch as his village is burned and his people are murdered, immolated or kidnapped. Unsure whether his parents are alive or dead, he joins a group of similarly bereft children -- some of Sudan's so-called Lost Boys -- and sets out on a cross-country trek to what he hopes is sanctuary in Ethiopia.

But the march itself proves to be an ordeal as horrific as the one he has just escaped. Disease, hunger, lion attacks and the depredations of rebels, raiders and unfriendly locals take a high toll on the marchers. "It is very easy for a boy to die in Sudan," Valentino observes at one point, with awful understatement. At times, Valentino believes that all he need do is stop and close his eyes for death to come.

Nor are the boys safe once they reach Ethiopia. During their march, Valentino and his friends keep their spirits up by indulging in elaborate "mythic visions" of their destination as a paradise where all their troubles will be over and they can wait out the war in luxurious tranquility. But after they arrive, the fall of the Ethiopian government turns the local river people into their enemies, and Valentino finds himself once again plunged into a hellish chaos where even the most unthreatening presence can turn suddenly malevolent:

" -- Come here! a woman said. I looked to find the source of the voice, and turned to see an Ethiopian woman in a soldier's uniform. . . .

" -- Don't fear me, she said. -- I am just a woman! I am a mother trying to help you boys. Come to me, children! I am your mother! Come to me!

"The unknown boys ran toward her. . . . When they were twenty feet from her, the woman turned, lifted a gun from the grass, and with her eyes full of white, she shot the taller boy through the heart."

In the end, though, What Is the What (an awkward, self-conscious title that alludes obscurely to an old Dinka creation myth) is not the unrelenting nightmare that such scenes might suggest. Eggers makes sure to give space to Valentino's less gruesome experiences, leavening the narrative with episodes -- some of them upbeat and a few even hilarious -- from his subsequent 10 years at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

But even when Valentino finally leaves Africa to start anew in Atlanta, nothing is easy for him. Education and jobs are hard to come by, and the lawless thugs of Atlanta prove to be almost as brutal as those of the Sudanese desert. "I am tired of needing help," he complains after being robbed and held captive in his own apartment. "I need help in Atlanta, I needed help in Ethiopia and Kakuma, and I am tired of it." His frustration is understandable. Still lost but no longer a boy, Valentino really wants nothing more than the opportunity to make his own way, unmolested by the upheavals of ethnic and racial conflict.

Unfortunately, these upheavals show no signs of ending soon. The recent crisis in Darfur (just the latest chapter in Sudan's troubled history) suggests that the paroxysms of African politics will be creating Valentino Achak Dengs for years to come. And while balanced, objective journalism may do a better job of explaining the complexities of such situations to a distracted world, autobiography, with its limited but urgent perspective, could be what's needed to make us truly take notice. Fictional or not, this book, at its heart, is a cry for acknowledgment of a very real, ongoing tragedy. "How blessed are we to have each other," Valentino reminds his American hosts at the close of this simple, sad and important book. "How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."

Reviewed by Gary Krist
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Dave Eggers is best known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), and here he shows that he is as adroit at telling another person's biography as he is narrating his own. Over three years, he conducted 100 hours of interviews with Deng and visited Sudan with him in "synergistic collaboration" (Time). Labeled as a novel, this work nonetheless has a historical basis and lends a personal face to the brutality of civil war, squalor, and the struggle for survival. A few critics questioned where Deng's story ended and Eggers's literary license began, and the book as a whole could have been better edited. While visceral and heartrending, Deng's and Eggers's joint story is ultimately a powerful tale of hope. When both People and the ever-glum Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times rave, how can one resist?

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Inspiring and compelling
I couldn't finish Eggers's other big book ("A Heartbreaking Work..."), but a colleague recommended this novel, so I decided to take a chance on it and was glad I did. The remarkable and true (though novelized) odyssey of Valentino Deng, one of the generation of Sudanese "Lost Boys," makes for compelling reading as we cross Sudan with Deng and his peers through hazard after hazard (thirst, starvation, animal attacks, gunship attacks). I like that kind of book where a lion eats some of the characters and a crocodile eats some others. (I won't tell you which.) I'd probably give it five stars except that the last third, where the survival stakes are not as high, loses steam. Still, this book prevails as an inspiring survival story.

Enjoyable juxtaposition
I really enjoyed the way that Eggers is able to contrast the kinds of difficulties that exist across very different cultural experiences. It seems very illogical that the young men who had survived through the kinds of death and destruction that reigned in their homeland could come to a place like the United States and face challenges that often end in similar tragedy, that difficult obstacles exist no matter what the environment and wrong choices can end in disaster whether in a refugee camp or in an Atlanta apartment. How can you survive famine, lions, the SPLA the thugs of Khartoum only to fall victim of random crime in a so-called civilized, Western country? But when it happens it is only the beginning. The story is very much Homer's Oddysey without a home to come back to and with only an outside chance of creating one in a new place. Heartbreaking yet hopeful.

What is the What
The book is a captivating story of one lost boy's journey. It is at times funny, sad, heartwarming. The reader adds a dimension of accessibility and warmth that makes the whole experience wonderful. I highly recommend it.