What is the What by Dave Eggers

I actually read this about six months ago, but think I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t quite put my thoughts in order enough to write about it. Then I saw it on the bookshelf and realised it had slipped through the C.M.L cracks.

Mr Eggers is feted as a saviour of modern literature, who burst onto the scene with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which I am ashamed to say have not yet read – I blame his second novel And You Shall Know Us By Our Velocity which I could not make heads nor tails of for putting me off), edits slightly wanky McSweeney’s and the more useful Voice of Witness series that uses the written word to highlight human rights atrocities.

This is the story of Valentino Achak Deng from Sudan, and his journey as a refugee and boy soldier. It’s told in first person, but Eggers, who has ghost written it, inserts a clever caveat at the start of the book classifying it as a novel – the main events are true but conversations may be ‘as remembered’. There are many parts in this book where you think that this must be fiction, but it’s horrifying to realise that so much of this book is true. The idea of millions of people living in an arid and desolate refugee camp for decades, children being eaten by lions on their three month long walk across Sudan, seeing family members macheted to death; it’s more than my brain, and even the most fertile patches of my imagination, cannot conjure up and would not want to.

Just as heartbreaking is the obstacles that Valentino faces once he does achieve his dream of being sent to America to start his new prosperous life. He becomes one of the ‘Lost Boys’, a term to describe the thousands of young men like him who have been displaced by war and cannot settle in their new lives. The modernity and bureaucracy of the United States is too much for many, who rack up thousands in mobile phone calls to Africa because they can’t read their phone contracts; menial jobs are the only ones on offer; well meaning volunteer sponsors quickly tire of the Lost Boys constant and sometimes unreasonable demands.

But Valentino never gives up. His unwavering optimism and grit to keep going when everything seems hopeless is absolutely awe-inspiring and really gave me some perspective on the hipster saying ‘first-world problems’. I challenge anyone not to read this and then complain about their lot in life.