What Is the What (English)

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. minimize