Rec Room: David Doody: What is the What

I recently finished What Is the What by Dave Eggers. What is the What is the account of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee of the Sudanese civil war, and the difficult hand dealt him. Or should I say, hands. It’s hard to believe that so much can happen to one person and he can live to tell about it. Which is exactly how this book came to be. Achak Deng is a real person and this is, for all intents and purposes, the story he told Eggers of his life as one of the Lost Boys. Originally slated as a book of nonfiction, with Eggers writing Achak Deng’s story as straight journalism—the way Eggers’ new book, Zeitoun, is told—Eggers, at some point in the writing process, decided to fictionalize the story. Still, in an introduction to the book, Achak Deng writes, “though it is fictionalized, it should be noted that the world I have known is not so different from the one depicted within these pages.” That world that Achak Deng has known is a cruel one. Eggers’ protagonist somehow finds something positive in the telling about that world. And, so we are left to assume that the man whose life “is not so different” finds the same thing. And so too, the author. And with that, we are left with a beautiful book, while the story it tells is a truly heartbreaking one.

Bio: David Doody is Guernica’s blog editor and a founding editor of InDigest Magazine. Read his last recommendation here.

Tags: books, dave eggers, recommendation, sudan

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