What Is The What

I have been a fan of Dave Eggers ever since I first read the title page of his first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. There was his photo surrounded by a bunch of animals with the note that Mr Eggers has no pets. Then came You Shall Know Our Velocity, the book where the story begins on the front cover and continues with no title page, intro, or preface. It's about two Wisconsin men in their 20's travelling the world giving money away, while trying to forget the death of their friend. There's a passage where they attempt to tape $300 to a goat with the message "Here I am Rock You Like A Hurricane" (a little 1980's metal flashback). His newest book, What is the What, still contains Egger's prose. The cover looks like an old grade school library bound non fiction book, but the story is not as lighthearted. It's a novel about Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Sudanese Lost Boys from the Second Sudanese Civil War. Some of the characters are composites, some things are fictionalized, but the overall situations depicted are true.

Before reading this book I was not familiar with the differences between the current situation in Darfur and the civil war of the 80's and 90's. The civil war written about in What is the What began in 1987 and is estimated to have displaced 4 million people and to have killed 1.9 million civilians (the highest since WW II). The Lost Boys were 25,000 3-13 year old boys who fled their villages to settle in refugee camps in Ethiopia and later Kenya. Deng was one of the 3,800 who later were allowed to resettle in the United States. Recently, a documentary about the Lost Boys called "God Grew Tired of Us" was released. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have tried to bring some attention to the film.

What is the What is the most powerful novel I have read for awhile so I felt the need to share my enthusiasm. It also brings up another horrific situation many of us have turned a blind eye towards, like Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia and currently Darfur. It really makes one think of the injustice our world has to offer.