What Is the What
Overview
Commentary
With WHAT IS THE WHAT Dave Eggers leaves behind his reputation as a literary wunderkind and trickster to write a heartfelt novel about his real-life friend Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese boy who lost his parents during the civil war, and traveled thousands of miles to reach refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Along the way he faced lions, murderous soldiers, dehydration, and exhaustion of both the body and the spirit. Deng eventually comes to America, where he finds a different kind of oppression in a culture that has no patience with, or interest in, the terrible realities of the rest of the world. Deng's harrowing story emerges in flashbacks during the course of a robbery at his Atlanta apartment, during which he is badly beaten. Deng and Eggers may seem like unlikely collaborators, but Deng's sobering story and Eggers's sharp prose blend into a powerful tale, proof of Eggers's developing and maturing literary voice.
Publisher's Notes
A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award traces the story of two child Sudanese civil war refugees and their witness to the devastation that has torn their homeland, a time during which one struggles to understand what is happening and the other joins the rebel army.
Reviews
"[O]ne finishes this wrenching and remarkable book with the impression that it's precisely what the author's past work--his foot-stomping memoir, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, the quieter fiction that followed, the expansive literary subculture he's created through McSweeney's--has been building up to.... [T]he results are stunning."
David Amsden
"It reads--and should be savored--as a powerful, if occasionally didactic, piece of oral history."
"[Dave] Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical." [starred review]
"Valentino Achak Deng's story remains a testament to the triumph of hope over experience, human resilience over tragedy and disaster."
Michiko Kakutani
"Intense, straightforward, lit by lightning flashes of humor, wisdom, and charm...WHAT IS THE WHAT is an extraordinary work of witness, and of art."
Francine Prose
Full Details
| Author | |
| Format | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781932416640 |
| List Price | $26.00 |
| Publisher | |
| Publication Date | 10/28/2006 |
| Fiction/Non-Fiction | |
| Release Status | In Print |
| Language | |
| Edition Number | 1 |
| Pages | 450 |
| Measurements | Weight: 1.9 Pounds |
| Height: 5.25 Inches |
| Length: 6.75 Inches |
| Thickness: 1.25 Inches |
Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved.
