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A review by mike_morse
What Is the What by Dave Eggers
4.0
I put off reading this book for a long time, thinking it might be too depressing, what with the horrors the "Lost Boys" endured. But when I finally picked it up (I needed books I owned for a long road trip), I was hooked in the first chapter. What confuses me is why it's called a novel. It's written in the first person of one of the boys (Achak) , and the afterwords describe his life since the end of the book. What are we to make of this? Is it what we'd call a true story, but only the dialog and details are necessarily made up? Or are we essentially reading one (albeit compelling) side of a complex, intense and highly partisan political and religious conflict? This matters because the atrocities of the "other side" are described in horrifying detail. Is this because the protagonist's side is in truth more virtuous, or because it's all the protagonist saw, or is Eggers unfairly painting a picture sympathetic to one side? I'd be willing to give Eggers the benefit of the doubt, except that the small portion of the story that takes place in the U.S. seems very biased.
I was going to give the book 5 stars, because it's a great story, and told well. But as I'm writing this review, and thinking over the book, I'm having second thoughts. Almost all of the story takes place in Africa, but it's told in flashbacks by Achak as he meets what he decides are unsympathetic people in America. He addresses them by name, then tells another part of his African story. I think Eggers adopted this method for the sake of irony (America didn't meet its promises to the Lost Boys), but the effect for me is one of a petulant child complaining that he only got one cookie when everyone else got two. Not only did he only get one cookie after suffering unimaginable hardship, but nobody seems to care. Therefore it must be the fault of all these people who in fact had nothing to do with distributing the cookies.
I was going to give the book 5 stars, because it's a great story, and told well. But as I'm writing this review, and thinking over the book, I'm having second thoughts. Almost all of the story takes place in Africa, but it's told in flashbacks by Achak as he meets what he decides are unsympathetic people in America. He addresses them by name, then tells another part of his African story. I think Eggers adopted this method for the sake of irony (America didn't meet its promises to the Lost Boys), but the effect for me is one of a petulant child complaining that he only got one cookie when everyone else got two. Not only did he only get one cookie after suffering unimaginable hardship, but nobody seems to care. Therefore it must be the fault of all these people who in fact had nothing to do with distributing the cookies.