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4.13 AVERAGE
4.13 AVERAGE
I learned so much from this book! I also just love the premise of a biographical novel, the idea of an author like Dave Eggers working really closely with folks with stories to tell to lift up and elevate them. I have a lot of respect for him and I am wildly humbled to have read about Valentino Achak Deng.
I had the pleasure of meeting Valentino Achak Deng at a reading at Connecticut College last year, and have only just finished reading "What is the What". The real-life meeting added meaning to the reading of this powerful story. I would recommend this book.
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11098839
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11098839
An amazingly crafted fictionalized autobiography. I found myself drawn into the lilting voice of the reader immediately and enjoyed the entire book. I listened to it on audiobook and the narrators voice is mesmerizing and believable as Valentino. For me, this was a book to be savored and pondered over. It took me several months to finish listening to this book, just catching snippets whenever I was in the car without my children. I have read other autobiographies of Lost Boys, but I enjoyed this one much more than any others.
Absolutely fantastic book!! A "must read" for everyone.
4.5 STARS
If I could use the phrase "tour de force" in a non-saccharine context, I would. In brief, Achak Deng's journey traverses more than a thousand kilometers, beginning in his small and vulnerable hometown of Marial Bai in southern Sudan. Before Dave Eggers has finished telling his story, we will have followed him across the desert into western Ethiopia, into refugee camps and SPLA (Sudanese People's Liberation Army) training grounds, and have spent a decade in the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya with eighty-thousand others. His story is riddled with more sickness and hardship, a miasmata of more death and fear and betrayal, than I could know in a hundred lifetimes.
To that end, I am discouraged by my own limited exposure to the Sudanese crisis; so complete was my ignorance that I knew little beyond the oft-cited conflict in Darfur. When Achak and his friends are first confronted with the fighting and genocide in the country's western province, they ask, innocently enough, "What's Darfur?" This is the degree of isolation in which generations of these tribes live and die. Perhaps you feel you've been inured to every hardship in film or literature, and that there are no travails in the human condition that could force you to set a book on the table just to catch a breath. Then a crowd of skeletal Lost Boys of Sudan, wandering the desert for weeks, chances upon a small group of trees; they clamber over one another, racing to the branches to devour whole birds, chicks and eggs entire, bones and blood dribbling from their chins and down their throats, all the while thankful to God just for one tiny dose of meat.
Dave Eggers was surprisingly deft at inhabiting Achak's mind and transmuting what would otherwise be a despairing story into an "autobiography" with the power to renew your belief, just for glimmers of a moment, in redemption, forgiveness, and most powerfully -- young love. I would share this story with anyone I care about, knowing they would pass it along again.
If I could use the phrase "tour de force" in a non-saccharine context, I would. In brief, Achak Deng's journey traverses more than a thousand kilometers, beginning in his small and vulnerable hometown of Marial Bai in southern Sudan. Before Dave Eggers has finished telling his story, we will have followed him across the desert into western Ethiopia, into refugee camps and SPLA (Sudanese People's Liberation Army) training grounds, and have spent a decade in the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya with eighty-thousand others. His story is riddled with more sickness and hardship, a miasmata of more death and fear and betrayal, than I could know in a hundred lifetimes.
To that end, I am discouraged by my own limited exposure to the Sudanese crisis; so complete was my ignorance that I knew little beyond the oft-cited conflict in Darfur. When Achak and his friends are first confronted with the fighting and genocide in the country's western province, they ask, innocently enough, "What's Darfur?" This is the degree of isolation in which generations of these tribes live and die. Perhaps you feel you've been inured to every hardship in film or literature, and that there are no travails in the human condition that could force you to set a book on the table just to catch a breath. Then a crowd of skeletal Lost Boys of Sudan, wandering the desert for weeks, chances upon a small group of trees; they clamber over one another, racing to the branches to devour whole birds, chicks and eggs entire, bones and blood dribbling from their chins and down their throats, all the while thankful to God just for one tiny dose of meat.
Dave Eggers was surprisingly deft at inhabiting Achak's mind and transmuting what would otherwise be a despairing story into an "autobiography" with the power to renew your belief, just for glimmers of a moment, in redemption, forgiveness, and most powerfully -- young love. I would share this story with anyone I care about, knowing they would pass it along again.
Amazing story. I felt like there were still some unanswered questions, but overall I really enjoyed the book.
When reading this book, you have to separate two things: the story of the Sudanese refugee Valentino/Dominic Achak Deng and what Dave Eggers did with it. I'll start with Deng.
It's impossible not to feel sympathy for Deng's story. What he describes is horrendous and endearing at the same time: the persecution of the dinka minority in South Sudan by the Islamic-Arab regime in Khartoum, the long deadly marches of the 'Lost Boys' to Ethiopia and, after their expulsion there, to Kenya , the difficult life in refugee camps, the existential choice between joining the armed resistance or staying aside, between accepting the offer to resettle in the rich West or returning to your family, and finally the problematic integration in the United States. The way Deng brings us his story is very authentic, especially because he tells it without much frills, even at the hardest of moments, and with great attention for the very mixed feelings he had towards what happened around him. The great merit of this story is that you learn how complex the refugee existence is, and how daunting the challenges are a refugee has to face.
The story is not only horrendous, but also endearing. Deng seems to be someone who has an unrestrained and open attitude, always tries to see the good and almost never gives up. That can be incredible: with all that happened to him you would expect him to be cynical and bitter or very fanatical and radical. That's not the case, and I believe him. The endearment also stems from the fact that his story at times becomes a very classic 'coming of age' story, for example, where he talks about the confrontation with the great mature world of the rebels, and more so when he describes his struggle with the other gender. At such moments, it seems like you're getting a picture of an ordinary puberty in an ordinary context, but of course that's not the case at all. And precisely that's one of the charms of this book.
Of course there also are a few shortcomings. As Deng says in the introduction, he brings a very personal and thus subjective story. The reader better be warned that he shall absolutely not get an objective picture of the complex conflict in Sudan in recent decades. For example: Deng is very short on the ethnic conflicts within South Sudan itself (between dinka and nuer), which, unfortunately, have become all too clear after the independence in 2011, with another awefull round of civil war as a consequence.
But then there's the role of Dave Eggers. The American author has been working with Deng for three years, listening to his story for hours and hours on end, and processing all of it in this book. Initially, I found that the method used by Eggers, a frame-story, really works. The opening scene in which our main character is brutally attacked and robbed in his Atlanta appartment, is brilliant: it immediately avoids that the whole story of Deng csan be seen as a succesfull rescue story ("Sudanese refugee is pulled out of the African pool of misery and builds a glorious future in the paradisiacal United States of America"). Also, the rapid succession of Deng's internal monologues to the robbers, looking back on more violent episodes in Sudan, has been done brilliantly. But then the dynamic of the story slows, and Eggers lets Deng bring longer and longer flashbacks, often also about his highly personal feelings, and thus at the expense of the tempo of the story.
So from a literary point of view, the book is not an overall success. But let’s not make too much of a fuss about that. "What's the What?" is a worthy human document. Maybe the tragedy it deals with wasn't the biggest of the last decades (what happened in Rwanda and Congo was actually much and much worse), but it remains a gruesome testimony of what people are doing to each other in this modern age and how the victims are dealing with this tragedy, each in their own way.
Finally of course, the question remains, "What is the What?". Do not expect an explicit answer to this question, even though the attentive reader will probably find enough clues to formulate a satisfying answer. Fortunately, Eggers uses this gimmick only very sparingly, because actually it’s not more than that: a gimmick.
It's impossible not to feel sympathy for Deng's story. What he describes is horrendous and endearing at the same time: the persecution of the dinka minority in South Sudan by the Islamic-Arab regime in Khartoum, the long deadly marches of the 'Lost Boys' to Ethiopia and, after their expulsion there, to Kenya , the difficult life in refugee camps, the existential choice between joining the armed resistance or staying aside, between accepting the offer to resettle in the rich West or returning to your family, and finally the problematic integration in the United States. The way Deng brings us his story is very authentic, especially because he tells it without much frills, even at the hardest of moments, and with great attention for the very mixed feelings he had towards what happened around him. The great merit of this story is that you learn how complex the refugee existence is, and how daunting the challenges are a refugee has to face.
The story is not only horrendous, but also endearing. Deng seems to be someone who has an unrestrained and open attitude, always tries to see the good and almost never gives up. That can be incredible: with all that happened to him you would expect him to be cynical and bitter or very fanatical and radical. That's not the case, and I believe him. The endearment also stems from the fact that his story at times becomes a very classic 'coming of age' story, for example, where he talks about the confrontation with the great mature world of the rebels, and more so when he describes his struggle with the other gender. At such moments, it seems like you're getting a picture of an ordinary puberty in an ordinary context, but of course that's not the case at all. And precisely that's one of the charms of this book.
Of course there also are a few shortcomings. As Deng says in the introduction, he brings a very personal and thus subjective story. The reader better be warned that he shall absolutely not get an objective picture of the complex conflict in Sudan in recent decades. For example: Deng is very short on the ethnic conflicts within South Sudan itself (between dinka and nuer), which, unfortunately, have become all too clear after the independence in 2011, with another awefull round of civil war as a consequence.
But then there's the role of Dave Eggers. The American author has been working with Deng for three years, listening to his story for hours and hours on end, and processing all of it in this book. Initially, I found that the method used by Eggers, a frame-story, really works. The opening scene in which our main character is brutally attacked and robbed in his Atlanta appartment, is brilliant: it immediately avoids that the whole story of Deng csan be seen as a succesfull rescue story ("Sudanese refugee is pulled out of the African pool of misery and builds a glorious future in the paradisiacal United States of America"). Also, the rapid succession of Deng's internal monologues to the robbers, looking back on more violent episodes in Sudan, has been done brilliantly. But then the dynamic of the story slows, and Eggers lets Deng bring longer and longer flashbacks, often also about his highly personal feelings, and thus at the expense of the tempo of the story.
So from a literary point of view, the book is not an overall success. But let’s not make too much of a fuss about that. "What's the What?" is a worthy human document. Maybe the tragedy it deals with wasn't the biggest of the last decades (what happened in Rwanda and Congo was actually much and much worse), but it remains a gruesome testimony of what people are doing to each other in this modern age and how the victims are dealing with this tragedy, each in their own way.
Finally of course, the question remains, "What is the What?". Do not expect an explicit answer to this question, even though the attentive reader will probably find enough clues to formulate a satisfying answer. Fortunately, Eggers uses this gimmick only very sparingly, because actually it’s not more than that: a gimmick.