This Is the That
Dave Eggers Saves the Sudan, One Lost Boy at a Time

Eggers’ adventure is no walk in the bush; rather it’s more like a run for your life.

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng. Photo by Jordan Bass

By John Hood

Of the small slew of titles Best Listed in ‘06, few were more universally Bested than Dave Eggers’ What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney’s, $26), the line-blurring novel that makes mincemeat of the memoir. The likes of Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Time, among many others, all gave top honors to the book, while a cadre of critics chorused its praise.

Francine Prose, in The New York Times, called What “intense, straightforward, lit by lightning flashes of humor, wisdom and charm,” while in the same broadsheet Michiko Kakutani insists the story “remains a testament to the triumph of hope over experience, human resilience over tragedy and disaster.”

Dierdre Donahue at USA Today said it “stands as the single most thought-provoking, unusual and moving book I have read all year.” And over at the Seattle Times, Michael Upchurch claims that “with its perfect blend of epic sweep and small, intimate moments, it stands worthily alongside the best work of Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri.”

But beyond the very many Best of’s and the onslaught of book crit beamings were the skyward sings from such estimable scribes as Uzodinma (Beasts of No Nation) Iweala, Khaled (The Kite Runner) Hosseini, and Paris Review Editor Philip Gourevitch, whose We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, tells harrowingly well the atrocities of Rwanda.

Like the works of the aforementioned, Eggers’ adventure is no walk in the bush; rather it’s more like a run for your life. The true tale of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Sudan’s infamous Lost Boys, told orally and then “concocted” as fiction by Eggers after years of exchanges, this is the grip that one reviewer summed up as “minefields and massacres, loneliness and fear, starvation, disease, predatory wild animals, the seemingly endless varieties of cruelty, the sustenance of fellowship and the surprising manifestations of instinctive human kindness.”

More though than the heaping accolades and much-deserved praise, is what What Is the What means, as book, as story and, yes, as statement. This is not some simple sign-off à la Save Darfur or many of the myriad NGO’s that — best intentions notwithstanding — seem better designed to allay the West’s conscience; no, this What is truly what’s what, with all the tears and the blood and the gory glory of the story told in full reveal. A coming of age, yes, but in and of an age where every day wakes uncertain even of coming.

In other words, just the kinda work that might spur the kinda action a country and a conflict and a crisis like the Sudan needs.

According to local Dinka legend, after God created men and women he gave them cattle, the source of “milk and meat and prosperity of every kind,” and then he offered them a choice: “You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What.”

Some wisely chose old Elsie, but others picked, and continue to seek, the ever-elusive What.

Even after reading Eggers’ heartbreakingly compelling account, I still don’t exactly know what is the What; I am sure though that This is pretty much the That.

And then some.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com.

Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.