What is the What

You know who should read What is the What? Um…everyone. Because it’s super good, not to mention important. It’s one of those rare books that are really easy to read, really gripping—it will grip you!—but also globally consequential.

What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is a docu-drama-type “novel” based on the real life of Valentino Achak Deng. At the age of seven (maybe eight) he watches his Sudanese village be attacked and destroyed by government-sponsored militia. Not knowing if his family is alive or dead, he's forced to run and ends up trekking (on foot with thousands of other boys) across the deserts of three countries. They walk for months, pursued by militiamen on horseback, government bombers and predatory animals, carrying with them almost nothing in terms of clothing, shoes, shelter, food or water. After this epic journey in which he faces down every imaginable hardship, Achak spends many years in desolate Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps before finally being resettled in the U.S. where he finds “a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges.” (So lazy, I quote the back of the book)

I don’t know if Valentino is the unluckiest person ever, or the luckiest for having survived a lifetime of horrors you and I could only conjure in our worst nightmares. But whatever he is, his story is extraordinary. This book is suspenseful, intense, horrifying, heartbreaking, at times surprisingly sweet and funny, but always incredibly moving—if you don’t at least have the urge to make large donations to Mercy Corps after reading this, you’re an absolute robot. I don’t know if there’s a word strong enough to sum up this guy’s life—the tragedy, trauma, loss, deprivation—but it was crazy to read his story and know it had all really happened while I sat around watching Seinfeld and picking the onions off my cheeseburger.

Things that are really great about this book:

• Eggers lays out the decades-old conflict in Sudan in a way that people like me who knew little about it can wrap their brains around. He weaves the history into his story really naturally and without ever making it a political invective.


• The author drops his self-consciously clever post-modernist “thang” and assumes the voice of Achak telling his story in first person. And outside of a few overly sophisticated turns of phrase, it works—sounds authentic and believable, as if it really were Achak telling his own story. Eggers does a terrific job of creating a “character” that is super lovable and pitiable but also respectable.


• Despite the fairly devastating subject matter, What is the What is not depressing or the type of horrifying that makes you have to put it down. As a work of literature, it’s incredibly impressive and I found myself reading on because I was wowed. And too, Eggers makes this young Sudanese so very human and real that I felt a strong sense of commonality that made me not want to turn away from him. And the book ends on a rather hopeful note.

So. I recommend this book to you and everyone you know. It really is amazing, definitely top 10 material. If you want to learn more about it or read a (way) more articulate review, visit McSweeney’s—they seem to have republished everything ever written about What is the What.