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ageorgiadis 's review for:
What Is the What
by Dave Eggers
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.