What is the What by Dave Eggers

One of the reasons I love reading is that books have the ability to transport you into the world of another person, and help you to begin to understand what it is like to live in a different place or a different time or an entirely different set of circumstances. We are all human, after all, and we have the same basic needs and desires and fears, though differences in language, culture, appearance, socioeconomic status, etc., sometimes make it hard for us to see that.

That is what this book did to me. It took an experience that is vastly different from my own and put me there, leaving me feeling as though I really knew the narrator, and understood him. At the same time, however, it also made visible to me the incredible chasm that exists between my life and the lives of such a large chunk of population who have experienced atrocities and deprivation that are unfathomable to me, and very much outside of their own individual control. I put down the book feeling as though I really needed to read it, but also not quite sure what reading it meant for me and how I live my life. I just felt that it must mean something.

Valentino Achak Deng is the narrator of the story, and he is a real person. He told his story to Dave Eggers, who transformed it into a novel of grand scope while still remaining true to Deng's voice and experiences. Although it is marketed as a novel, I think the line is blurred, and Eggers and Deng make it known that the things that seem most incredible in the book are all real (the two of them talk about the process of writing in an interview here).

The result of a three-year collaboration driven by Valentino Achak Deng's desire to share his story to the world begins with his boyhood in Marial Bai, a village in southern Sudan, from which he is driven at a very young age in the midst of conflict between the Arab north and the African south. Valentino joins thousands of young boys, with parents missing or dead, who walked across Sudan to Ethiopia, facing starvation, violence, lions, recruitment as child soldiers, eventually ending up in the refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. From there, many of them were finally resettled in the United States, with hopes of gaining an education and returning as a new hope for their homeland of Sudan. Valentino's story in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya is woven almost effortlessly with the story of his life in the United States. The contrasts in circumstance between these two stories are stark, but the parallels in the very personal and very human story that is being told bind the novel together, and bind the reader to Valentino himself.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Now that I've finished the book, I can't get it out of my mind. It addresses terrible events and themes, and yet it is not dark. It is both eye-opening and incomprehensible, and in the end it is profoundly hopeful.