Product Description

What is the What is an epic novel about the lives of two boys during the Sudanese civil war. For those who think they know about the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan, this novel will be an eye-opener. And if you think you know the work of Dave Eggers, this is in many ways a complete departure: it's straightforward and unflinching, and yet full of unexpected humor and adventure amid the madness of war. Eggers has been working on the book for four years now, deeply entrenched in the community of Sudanese refugees in the U.S., and in 2003 went to southern Sudan with a refugee named Valentino Achak Deng. During that trip, Deng was reunited with the family he hadn't seen in 17 years. What is the What is a book about the lives of these two boys -- one, at seven, too young to know what's happening to his country; the other, at ten, old enough to fight for the rebel army.

Through it all, the two boys persevere through one of the most brutal civil wars the world has ever known, finding themselves in one unbelievable, utterly surreal situation after another. What is the What is thought-provoking, exciting, and repeatedly heartbreaking.

Presented unabridged on 17 CDs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #522856 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-12
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 17
• Binding: Audio CD

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
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

A Simple Plea from African Victims for Just a Few Listeners
At an impressionable young age of eight or ten, Achak Deng sits at his father's feet in their home village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan, listening to his father's rendition of a Dinka creation myth. God has created a proud Dinka man and a beautiful woman, and now he offers them the idea of a cow to provide them with milk and meat and wealth. "You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What," God tells the first man. "What is the What?" the man asks. "I cannot tell you," God replies. "Still, you have to choose ...between the cattle and the What." The man and woman wisely choose the cattle, thereby passing God's test to appreciate what they had been given.

Thence comes the eponymous phrase whose unknowable answer frames Dave Eggers' latest book. Through the survival struggles of one of the country's thousands of Lost Boys, WHAT IS THE WHAT traces the late 20th Century history of Sudan, from the incipient struggles of the black African south against the Moslem-leaning government of Khartoum to today's current manifestation of this genocide, Darfur. When the story opens, Valentino Achak Deng has already left his native country for Atlanta, one of the many Lost Boys (and a smattering of Lost Girls) who have gained asylum and sponsorship in America, Canada, Australia, and other Western countries. Achak has been mentored and assisted to the degree that charitable organizations and personal acts of kindness can accomplish. Still, we quickly learn that he finds himself struggling at every turn to make enough money in menial jobs to survive, achieve a few modest comforts, and maintain respectable grades in his community college studies so as to seek admission to a full, four-year college. As if the various horrors he suffered in his flight from the Sudan to Kenya were not awful enough, Eggers puts his protagonist directly into the powerless victim role from nearly the first page of the book - Achak answers a knock on his door only to find himself assaulted and bound and his apartment being robbed.

Throughout WHAT IS THE WHAT, Eggers sustains a narrative conceit in which Achak relates his life story to those around him in complete silence. He begins his "thought tale" with his robbers, and then with the young boy Michael whom the robbers leave to guard him while they take away their first load of stolen goods. Wherever Achak goes in his American dream world, whether in the hospital emergency room after the robbery or at his front desk job at a health club, he finds himself telling more of his story, yet never aloud. What could have ended as a cloying literary device comes off instead as a subconscious plea for sympathy, a silent scream for an audience that shows even a moment's care for the victims of Sudanese (and African, generally) war, famine, and genocide. Not surprisingly, the unhearing Americans who surround Achak every day know nothing about his life, his family, or his culture. They know nothing of his sufferings, of the Lost Boys whose lives truly were lost and of those survivors who in many ways remained just as lost. They would likely never be Sudanese again, nor could they ever fully be Ethiopians, Kenyans, or Americans.

Eggers' story is at its best when relating the horrors of genocide and life as a refugee, on the run or in the camps. Life becomes terrifyingly elemental, death utterly capricious. Every decision, whether random or planned, has implications and often uncontrollable consequences. While WHAT IS THE WHAT may lack the powerful first-hand immediacy (and irrationality) portrayed in Iweala's BEASTS OF NO NATION, Eggers gives the reader a broader and more historical perspective on at least one of Africa's bloody and long-standing internal conflicts. In the Lost Boys' world as portrayed by Dave Eggers', is "the What" a threat (as in, "or else") or just another choice? From Achak's burned out village of Marial Bai, Ethiopia represents more than a haven - Achak's hyper-fantasizing friend Michael K pictures it a veritable Eden. Biblical references and suggestions abound - there's Achak's other good friend Moses (who later wants to travel from Seattle to Tucson on foot to draw attention to the Sudanese cause), and the mysteriously life-affirming Maria, the Christ figure of the Quiet Baby, and the St. John in the Wilderness figure of the farmer who lives nowhere but saves Achak's life. After Ethiopia comes Kenya, an ultimately America. Is America then "the What," or is just another choice, a different type of cow than that first offered in God's test? Eggers' story is properly ambiguous on this account, suggesting an answer that leans toward settling with the cattle and eschewing "the What." Like many members of war-induced Diaspora, we cannot help but think that a new, more worldly Achak will someday return to Marial Bai and the remains of his family and former life.

Aside from one false note - the tie-in of Achak's departing flight from Kenya to the events of 9/11 comes across as a wholly unnecessary contrivance - WHAT IS THE WHAT strikes nothing but solid chords. Eggers reveals refugee life for what it is, making clear that for many such victims, being a refugee in America can be at least as difficult in its way as being one in a Kenyan U.N. camp. "The What" of America really is, for Achak and his tragic girlfriend Tabitha and so many others, just a different cow. Who is to know which What we should say yes to? Perhaps that's the point, to just keep trying, never settling for too little but never forgetting our first home and first offer, either. Dave Eggers renders the story of man's inhumanity to man, and one extraordinary man's struggle for identity and dignity, with his own beautiful touch of humanism. Amid those endless horrors and struggles to survive, his characters never become caricatures - he makes us feel and cry for each and every one of them.

Unusual mashup of real and fiction
There are a number of really excellent non-fiction autobiographies of the Lost Boys currently available, 5 of them (see below). "What Is the What" is the only fictionalized account I am aware of. I've read some of the non-fiction accounts, and they are just as compelling, fascinating and dramatic as fiction; in many ways more so because they are factual and have a sense of "otherness" and level of specific detail. Although the novel has plenty of violence, it seems somewhat sterilized and made more palatable for the sensibilities of a middle class American audience - Deng's "voice" (really Eggers?) is confident and optimistic about the future, rarely did I sense the utter loneliness, despondency, hopelessness, weakness and fear that is palpable in the real autobiographies.

This is not a bad book, Eggers has created an entertaining work of art, not unlike what Charles Dickens did for the poor in "Oliver Twist", it serves to advance a social cause. But the real autobiographies are just as page-turning readable and even more emotionally moving because of their truthfulness. Literary critic Lee Siegel in "The New Republic" took the problem even further saying the novels "innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance.. How strange for one man to think that he could write the story of another man, a real living man who is perfectly capable of telling his story himself -- and then call it an autobiography. Where is the dignity in that?" Francis Prose in "The New York Times" said the novel is very popular among younger readers in their 20s and I guess this is not surprising since fiction is usually more approachable and accessible than non-fiction, but there are some excellent real-life accounts, told in the actual words and voice of someone from Sudan, it is a challenge to step into someone else's world, but can be a transformative experience.

--Lost Boys Autobiographies--
* They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky
* God Grew Tired Of Us: A Memoir
* The Lost Boys of Sudan
* The Journey of the Lost Boys
* Lost Boy No More

An important, stirring novel
"What is the What" is a sprawling, semi-biographical novel about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee living in Atlanta and reflecting on his life story as he is robbed and beaten by two thieves who have gotten into his apartment. The narrative goes back and forth between Valentino's present situation and his youth in the village of Marial Bai and, later, his years fleeing his homeland and becoming one of the displaced "Lost Boys" in a Kenyan refugee camp. His story is harrowing and brutal; before getting to Kenya the very young Valentino bears witness to innumerable atrocities and hardships. Believing that his family was murdered, he embarks on a deadly trek across the desert to find safe haven in Ethiopia, and many of his fellow walkers and friends die of starvation or attacks by lions and soldiers. Safety in Ethiopia is only short-lived, however, and Valentino must escape again. Before age twelve he has seen the very worst of humanity: its selfishness, its greed, its corruption and violence, but Valentino remains optimistic for his future, even when life seems determined to keep him down. But disappointment with his new life in America may be his breaking point, as he has failed to find a job that can support him adequately, get the education that he would need to get ahead, and continues to be be a victim of senseless violence and a government/society that can't be bothered to care about his plight. "What is the What" is a searing, eye-opening experience about the crises in Africa and the way its victims are routinely passed off by society -- when sometimes just the simplest of kindnesses would be enough to help them by. Instead, people like Valentino Achak Deng have been denied their very humanity, and seem doomed to live life on the fringes of society. The title, an excellent recurring theme on Eggers' part, refers to an old Dinka legend about the creation of the world, when God offered his people cows and shelter to survive, and then offered them the What instead if they would rather have it. What the What is cannot be answered, but in Valentino's quest he comes across many possible answers and theories. The novel is not without fault: there are numerous grammatical errors (usually 'where' instead of 'were,' etc.), it could have been about fifty pages shorter, and the switches from present day to past are frequently a little too jarring, but on the whole the novel excells, and its message makes it well worth your time. Highly recommended.