This is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan's "Lost Boys". I haven't finished it yet, but that's my own fault--the book is great.

OK. It's done. I've finished. It took me awhile to finish this book--and here's why: I started this book in the Spring of '08 after having read three other books w/ similar themes in the Fall of '07. It sounds horrible, I know, but the shock and awe and sadness of this story was no longer new to me, so it didn't pull me in like it should have. There were significant differences between Achak's story and those told in A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier,Allah is Not Obliged, and Refugee Boy (the other books I read), however. Namely, Achak was never a child soldier. But the young boy on the run who is separated from his family, who has no idea where he is headed or who to trust or if any of his relatives are alive or where he is going to sleep or eat or how many more of his friends will starve to death or be eaten by lions or be forced to fight for a rebel militia is, sadly, all too familiar.

But What is the What distinguishes itself in a couple of significant ways. For starters, it's not exactly fiction and it's not exactly non-fiction--but a kind of hybrid of the two genres. Valentino Achak Deng's story is told second hand through Dave Eggers. The pair spent a great deal of time together--

"Over the course of many years" Valentino explains "Dave and I have collaborated to tell my story by way of tape recording, by electronic mailings, by telephone conversations and by many personal meetings and visitations...I told Dave what I knew and what I could remember, and from that material he created this work of art."

Much to Eggers credit, it's hard to imagine as you read this "novel" that the voice you are hearing is anyone other than Achak's. At no point did I doubt the validity or authenticity of the story. And, thankfully, at no point did I feel I was being tricked by a slick author into feeling emotional, or overly sentimental over something that I normally would have no reaction to. I hate being cued that way. We all have different triggers, and I like being able to judge what warrants an emotional response on my own. Eggers does a good job here of presenting you with a story and letting you make of it what you will.

The other, or one of the other I should say, main ways in which Achak's story distinguishes itself is that is doesn't end happily w/ relocation in the U.S. or Great Britain, etc. In fact, at the start of the story Achak is living in Atlanta, GA post the Sudanese Civil War and is robbed and beaten in his apartment he shares w/ another Lost Boy. Both of whom work two jobs, earn close to minimum wage, and are full time students. We hear his life story as he looks back, silently:

"When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I had seen."

And so we are always there when someone wrongs Achak, to hear his "silent" stories.

As hard as it is for someone like me--raised on cable tv, fast food, and 80s music--to imagine what life was like for a Lost Boy, it's even harder for me to imagine what life was like for Valentino Achak Deng. The sadness and just plain shittiness he is forced to deal with does not end with the end of the Civil War. Still, if I weren't exposed to realities like his, I'd probably be an even bigger asshole than I am now. Yes, my job sucks. But for fuck's sake--things could be worse. They could always be worse.

I think I'm not unusual in not knowing a lot about Africa in general, let alone Sudan or Kenya. For a lot of us, Africa in school was just that really hard geography test.

And let's face it, for most of us Westerners as adults, Africa mostly just makes us uncomfortable. Sort of something we'd just rather not think about, which isn't a good thing really at all, but I guess it helps us feel better about things.

So while I type this at work during some downtime, and my coworkers complain about not getting as much paid time off as they would in Europe (of course ignoring any other differences between continents), people in this book have never seen ICE before. And their friends get eaten by tigers. And a starving caravan of naked boys struggles to gather the last of their strength to climb trees in the hopes of finding a meal of tiny raw bird eggs filled with feathers and beaks and wings.

I can't help but compare this to "Angela's Ashes," which is sort of a similar hardship story of someone from Ireland. However, I sort of thought that one was a load of crap. That story was strangely entertaining and described true poverty, which "What" also is at times, but "Angela's Ashes" lacked any serious depth -- and that for a true autobiography just made it seem lazy or poorly written. Furthermore, it's no fault of that author (Frank McCourt), but I can't help thinking that a lot of its success is based on some sort of white guilt complex (come on, every white person claims to be part Irish) to feel like their people struggled just as bad as others. Very cynical, I know, and I'm not proud that I think this way (I'm white too, btw).


"What Is The What" is trickier because it's written and told in first person by Dave Eggers, who is painfully obviously not a Sudanese refugee. I think he handled the task well, and while no one likes the idea of a white guy making a bunch of money in this kind of situation, I think he did it as best he could. It's a story that deserves to be told and has helped publicize much about a region most of us know very little about. What a hell of a story this guy has, too.

At times it seemed like even the author grew weary from the sheer repeated hopelessness of events, just sort of retelling the constant bad news. "Then my friend died. Then I was finally boarding the plane to America but it happened to be 9/11. Why does god hate me? etc"



The whole thing is slightly unsettling because of the whole ghost writer thing. While I don't think it's truly a ghost writer situation, the story is still told as if Achack is the one writing it. I'm sure Eggers put in tons of work on this and did hundreds of interviews and worked together on the story, and became great friends with Achack and all that truly good stuff, but as a reader you still just can't help wondering what is Eggers and what is Achack. And you have to wonder what is embellished, suggested, steered toward a different direction, etc.

This is told as fiction but we're supposed to take it as an autobiography, so it's just kind of hard to swallow completely. And the narrative voice is in this sort of African "accent" that seems authentic but again is just kind of unsettling knowing a really really white guy wrote it.

But don't let this discourage you from reading it. There's a lot of good stuff here. There's also a lot of humor and just plain good description that really brings the people to life. It really is a story of people, and how your birthplace does a lot to determine what kind of life you will live. That's what this kind of story needs to be truly effective, just real people readers can relate to. Really gets the water works going.

There's one profound moment where a street musician (I think) sings a song asking why so many mothers had to bring children into such a difficult world. Achack comes off as a great guy with a great sense of morals and ambition, and you can't help but like him.

Non capisco perchè non prendono l'aereo? (ha detto un tizio al bar l'altro giorno sentendo quanto spendono gli immigrati per imbarcarsi....)

Sono strani e tortuosi i percorsi che ti portano a certe letture. Con questa ho seguito il cammino dei "ragazzi perduti" in fuga dalla guerra che insanguina il Sudan per raggiungere i campi profughi prima dell'Etiopia e poi del Kenia. Una fuga drammatica, di migliaia di bambini sfuggiti per miracolo ai massacri, ai leoni che li vedevano come cibo, all'odio di chi, vedendoli arrivare, temeva un'invasione che li costringesse a condividere la loro terra o il loro già magro raccolto.
Vita nei campi profughi per anni, perdendo così i propri anni migliori, una vita decisa da altri, senza un futuro nelle tue mani. Fatica per affrancarsi, sfuggendo alla tentazione di farsi soldato-bambino, lottando per un'istruzione in scuole senza sedie, senza quaderni, seduti per terra, facendo segni nella polvere per imparare a scrivere. Per imparare l'Inglese. E poi per accettare una diaspora che porterà molti di loro negli Stati Uniti, con la speranza che accomuna tutti: un po' di soldi per non patire la fame, una moglie da amare e da cui essere amati, per poter pensare a fare bambini, e dar loro una casa.
Tutto ciò che fa muovere il mondo, tutti noi, una vita normale, un lavoro dove non ci sia una guerra.
E dietro, appena accennato, gli interessi dei governi, e non solo africani, sulle terre ricche di petrolio che quindi devono essere "liberate" dai loro primitivi abitanti.
Devo ringraziare la Pitta che mi ha caldeggiato questa lettura.
Vorrei farlo leggere a molti italiani in questo momento in cui ho l'impressione che il genere umano abbia perso di vista la propria umanità.

In most tales of overcoming adversity, the protagonist faces a great challenge, which no one things they can overcome, and does so despite impossible odds. Yet for those who have experienced the most adversity in life, the truly tragic, and marvelous, thing is that the obstacles that most of us overcome without even thinking, every day - for them, they are CONSTANT and CRIPPLING.

So we follow Achak/Dominic/Valentino Deng as he escapes from the genocidal horrors of Sudan and treks across Ethiopia to safety. Journey over, yes? No. He must wait years for his asylum application to the US to be granted. In the US, he is robbed, beaten, kidnapped, and left for dead by African immigrants. He cannot get decent medical treatment and must sit in the waiting room of the free clinic while the personnel wish him to go away. He cannot get a decent scholarship or keep his head above water at school. Yet he never gives up, even as he wonders why life is so damn hard.

This marvelous book and secondhand-mostly-memoir will make you view life, privilege, and the world through a very different lens. Consider everything you have in your life. Would you give it up to pursue the what? But, what is the what? That is a question that cannot be answered. But it is a question that should nevertheless be pondered.

So beautifully written, but oh so devastating in parts.

It's 2 a.m. and I can't stop thinking about this book. Please read this autobiography/novel. It's horrifying yet beautiful, but it very much deserves to be read.

It takes a certain and rare kind of writer to make a story about civil war, genocide, and a refugee crisis boring and unreadable; that writer, specifically, is Dave Eggers. It's not that I don't understand the purpose that this book serves - just as we import the Third World's raw resources to fuel our own material greed, so must we import their tragedies to break up the monotony of our lives. My question is - can't we get better books to do it?

First of all, the voice is terrible. At points it reads like a parody of an American trying to imitate an African (oh, wait, it is, although Dave Eggers has probably at least met some, so I don't know what his excuse is). Take the very first sentence: "I have no reason not to answer the door so I answer the door." What, did the Sudanese civil war rob fake-Deng of the ability to use pronouns? The language is stilted and formal in a very amateurish way, not at all the way a young man talks, and for no good reason.

Second, why is it that going through a capital-T Tragedy means that none of the characters are allowed to have personalities? This happens all the time in fiction about genocide. No one is allowed to be cowardly, or funny, or petty, or squabbling - everyone must be stoic and long-suffering, because they are Noble Victims, and that is how Noble Victims are supposed to act (in real life, many people who go through tragedy tend to develop dark, savage senses of humor, but you wouldn't know that from reading this). After all, you can only be a nuanced and articulated character if you grew up in the suburbs of America, preferably with an unhappy childhood and a substance abuse problem in college.

Third, Eggers' writing is just flat and boring. Take, for instance, Eggers describing an air raid:

"But the plane returned a few minutes later, and soon after, there was a whistle. Dut screamed to us that we needed to run but did not tell us where. We ran in a hundred directions and two boys chose the wrong direction. They ran for the shelter of a large tree and this is where the bomb struck."

That's it? One of the most intense and terrifying things that can happen to you in life, and this is the treatment it gets? The plane returned and soon there was a whistle? Eggers writes like he just wants to get it over with. Which I don't exactly blame him for.

There is a bit of unintentional humor - when, in the present story, Deng tells Americans that he's from Sudan, but not Darfur, they quickly lose interest, because Americans only care about the foreign trouble spots that are hip to care about. Dumb, trendy Americans! But the real joke, of course, is that concurrent with the Sudanese civil war was/is the one in the Congo, which dwarfs the Sudanese conflict in horror, body count, and anything else you can think of. But Eggers, along with the rest of the world, doesn't care, because it's messy and complicated, whereas in Sudan you have Good Guys and Bad Guys. Much easier to understand - and much easier to sell books about.

All that having been said, Eggers is a genius; just not a literary genius. He is a genius for pulling the ultimate bait and switch: take someone else's story and then become the hero of it. Because that is who the hero is here, Dave Eggers, even though he doesn't appear once in the actual plot. After all, young Valentino's story would have remained untold - if it were not for the Deus Ex Maquina of Dave Eggers, who tells it like no one else can. Remember Eggers' first book, "A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius?" That title wasn't cutesy and ironic, it was literal. That's what Eggers wanted to write, and now he's given you one. So what if the heartbreak is someone else's?

If you think I'm being too harsh, then ask yourself this: why didn't Eggers just write a nonfiction book, or a straight up biography of Deng? At points, I'm tempted to think that it's because he couldn't be bothered to do some basic research (i.e., the repeated references to "Darfurians"; "Darfur" means "The Land of the Fur," the Fur being the people that live there, so this is sort of like referring to Polish people as "The People From The Land of the Polish." Also, the 1997 death of Princess Diana for some reason seems to come in the plot well after the 1998 African embassy bombings). The answer is that Eggers needs to hide behind someone else's genuine suffering, because that defuses any criticism of his own lifeless, droning prose. Insult Eggers, and you're insulting the sanctity of the Sudanese Lost Boys' pain and suffering. Point out the platitudes that Eggers shovels out in lieu of the real questions, which generally do not have easy answers or any answers at all, and you're heartless and callow. It's not a hard shell game that Eggers plays here - but there is none better at it than him.

I’ve read a couple stories of survival recently, and I’m always astonished at the good and the bad that is intrinsic in our fellow human beings. Achak is one of the good guys – exposed to so much death and gore in his early years, struggling with his belief in God (and who wouldn’t given his life?) – and this man is someone we all need to know. This man is loving, kind, endearing, adorable. It was the descriptions of the bad in people, however, that brought me to tears more than once, wondering again how does one person endure such endless heart break in their lives?

Achak was born in the Southern Sudan region in the Dinka tribe. During the time of the 2nd civil war in the 1980's, this region was taken over by the Arab government of the North (because of its cattle land, plentiful water, and later on oil of course). Achak lost track of his family after witnessing much violence and suffering, becoming one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan. The story goes back and forth between his new life in Atlanta and his remembrances of his homeland and his long walk from there to Ethiopia, and later to Kenya, where he lived most of his formative years in refugee camps. I learned so many things I probably should have known but didn’t. These civil wars lasted for decades, and the living conditions for the refugees deplorable – meals once a day if you’re lucky, water only if you go wait in line for it every morning, little protection from rain and mosquitoes, fear of being eaten by the wild animals. We are lead to believe in news stories that refugee camps are temporary, that someday these people are returned to their homes or families. But in many or most cases the camps become their home for life. Astonishing. Achak witnessed hundreds of young boys and adults dying around him, and multiple times is made to walk on, bury, and occupy the same space with the corpses.

The living conditions in the States, once the Lost Boys are relocated around the country, are paltry and inadequate, but luxurious to Achak, now known as Valentino, when compared to the camps. His suffering continues despite many kind people he meets in Atlanta. Because, you can never forget those bad guys who seek out ways to spoil it all for you. Achak/Valentino receives more than his fair share from the latter. And he accepts all that life gives him, all that God gives him, quietly, enduringly, which is what he learned as a child when hearing the story of The What from his father. A must read!

You. Must. Read. This. Book. It will stay with you forever. This is the story of the life of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan who started walking when he was only 8 or 9 and didn't stop for thirteen years.

Eggers has, brilliantly I feel, chosen to tell Achak's story as a novel, though it was created from years of oral history from Achak and accurately portrays the horrors faced by so many people- over two and a half million of whom died in Sudan's Civil War. Told as a first person narrative, the novel format allows Eggars to flip in and out of time, beginning with a time in which Achak is living in Atlanta after being airlifted from a Kenyan refugee camp. Knowing from the beginning that he "makes it" in no way diminishes the horrors and fear you will encounter as you read. And starting as he does, in a time in Atlanta where Achak was robbed and tied up lets you also know right off that life doesn't become magically easy after reaching the US.

"I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them." It seems trite to talk about the incredible losses this man has seen and yet he remains hopeful, positive, spirited. But it's true. There were times he admits he wanted to chose to die, to give up. But it is always fascinating to read about people who persevere in horrific situations.

Corri ragazzo, corri.



Compro sempre i libri di Eggers, a scatola chiusa.
A volte li amo, a volte no.
Erano solo ragazzi in cammino è molto di più di un libro da amare.
È un libro che racconta la vita, che ti prende per mano e non ti lascia più.
È un libro che sarà difficile dimenticare.
Perché non si deve e non si può dimenticare.
Confesso, quando ho girato la copertina per iniziare a leggerlo, alla vista della cartina del Sudan, di aver pensato ‘’Oh no, questo libro è ambientato in Africa... a me non piace molto l'Africa, non ne subisco il fascino'' (anche se poi ho letto con passione i libri di Karen Blixen, quelli di Nadine Gordimer, di Nagîb Mahfuz, di J. M. Coetzee, di Kuki Gallmann; insomma, in letteratura ho spaziato per tutta l'Africa!).
Ma è stato un solo un momento, mi è bastato leggere la prefazione per esserne conquistata, in ogni senso: dal romanzo, perché Dave Eggers, qui come non mai, usa una prosa pulita, scorrevole, capace di conquistare e di colpire al cuore; dalla storia, perché è vera, accidenti se è vera, ed è storia di oggi, che forse la maggior parte di noi ignora ed è contenta di continuare ad ignorare: perché una volta che l'hai conosciuta non è più possibile tornare indietro e non puoi far finta che non esista; dai paesaggi, perché pur senza esserci mai stato, Marial Baj è un villaggio che adesso saprai che esiste e ne conoscerai ogni angolo, ogni colore, ogni casa; dall'umanità che lo pervade e che lo popola, perché quelle lunghe code di bambini e di persone indifese in movimento, che hanno attraversato il Sudan fino alle frontiere con il Kenia e l'Etiopia, cercano una sola cosa: il diritto alla vita.
Dopo averlo letto, e si deve leggerlo, Valentino Achak Deng non sarà più solo un nome, perché vorrai dargli un volto, sapere come vive e come vive la sua gente, in Sudan. [12-19/8/2007]



Letto nell’estate del 2007, questo romanzo è stato per me un colpo di fulmine: apprezzavo già Eggers, come dicevo, la sua Opera struggente di un formidabile genio mi aveva subito conquistata, ma questo parlava dritto al cuore, se possibile, con la stessa intensità con cui il giovane Dave si occupava, qualche tempo prima, del piccolo Toph.
È così, perché la lettura per me è sempre stata, soprattutto, condivisione, nel mese di dicembre ho girato almeno tre librerie - vado a memoria, la Eritrea, la Futura e l’allora Minerva (poi tutte riunite sotto il marchio Arion, ora miseramente fallito), per acquistarne cinque copie da regalare per Natale alle mie due sorelle, a mio fratello e a mio zio e… la quinta non ricordo a chi.
Beh, nessuno apprezzò tanto quanto me questa lettura, ciascuno con sfumature differenti di gradimento (dallo scarso al buono) lesse l’opera di Eggers, che resta, però, iscritta nell’aneddotica di famiglia ed è ancora ricordata da tutti con divertimento: da qui la mia idea, nonostante continui a credere che la lettura possa essere condivisione, che certi entusiasmi e certe passioni, restino un'esperienza che non può sempre essere contagiosa. [12/4/2018]

What Is the What, Dave Eggers fiction based life of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese child refugee who immigrated to the United States under the Lost Boys of Sudan program, escaping fates of many & luck not becoming a child soldier it's brutal and disheartening with sardonic humor but even in the states he suffers a home invasion and being robbed of everything, while trussed up he reflects back on his early life in Sudan. What I found out what is the what? We have a 40 year war to gain independence from north Sudan which is the early focus of this story of South Sudan that it became the world's newest country in 2011 but wait 2 years and a 6-year civil war with attempted genocidal massacres estimated 400,000 dead & millions of displaced persons. On one side President Salva Kiir of the Dinka tribe against Vice President Reik Machar, of the Nuer tribe, war weary when in 2019 an uncertain peace accord was signed, with faint hope of some sort of lasting peace seems to exist, along with 12000 UN peace keepers. But with oil reserves up for stakes and these recent power struggles to control all. Sudan has only got hope & faith for a formation of a stable peaceful government.

When the civil war between the north and the south of Sudan reaches Achak's far western Dinka village of Marial Bai, he is a child of about seven years old who still spends most of his time with his mother, or playing on the floor of his father's general store. He did sometimes go out with the others boys, including his friends William K and Moses, to watch the cattle, but he is with his mother the day the government helicopters come, killing indiscriminately, which was only the beginning. When the villagers didn't leave, the government-backed murahaleen - Arabs on horses - come sweeping in to finish the job. It is the last time Achak sees his mother, and he has no idea what fate has befallen any of his siblings or stepmothers. He can only flee, running as far as he can.

He finally comes upon a large group of boys like him being led by his old teacher, a young man called Dut Majok, who has a tendency to lead them in circles but never stops looking out for the boys and sees them, after months of walking and encounters with lions, crocodiles and hostile villagers, to Ethiopia and the refugee camp called Pinyudo on the Gilo River. When a change in government comes to Ethiopia - otherwise known as a military coup - the refugees are violently driven out, many killed by soldiers and many others lost the river they are forced to cross, or the crocodiles that live there. It takes a year for the survivors - including thousands of "Lost Boys" like Achak, to reach Kenya, where a new refugee camp is constructed at Kakuma, which basically means nowhere - a hot, dry, dusty desert land that no one wants, no one except the local tribespeople that is.

There Achak spends many years until, finally, towards the end of 2001 his name if finally called to be one of thousands of Lost Boys and Girls being relocated to the United States. A new beginning and many hopes and dreams that he has barely dared to entertain before suddenly seem possible. After all this time of dodging bullets and starvation, Achak is sitting on the plane in Nairobi, along with a group of other young men like him, when the news comes through: no planes will be leaving. New York has been attacked, the Twin Towers are burning, get off the plane. If you can think of anything that could go wrong for Deng, it happened. But he does finally make it to the city of Atlanta where he meets his sponsors and starts working on his goal of getting a degree - which turns out to be much harder and more complicated (and costly) than he ever thought possible.

This is the first book by Eggers that I have read, even though I have three others already (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Zeitoun and A Hologram for the King), so I was able to read this purely as Deng's story, in Deng's voice. Deng is a strong, vivid character, and his personal story comes truly alive in the creative hands of Eggers. Not being able to tell where Eggers' voice and writing style intrudes on what is, essentially, someone else's story, it read smoothly and convincingly. Full of details, historical context, explanations skilfully woven in, as well as philosophical, moral and ethical ponderings, and an intense emotional engagement and humour. This is a man - one of many - who was shat on by life and circumstance, who questioned his belief in his god many times, but who persevered and struggled on. For the Sudanese, his is just one story of thousands like it, indistinguishable most of the time, and certainly nothing special, but for us, it is a hero's story, and a bold, honest, brutal one at that.

It begins in the present day and is told in present tense, and introduces us to Valentino Achak Deng as he answers his door to a couple of black Americans who proceed to rob him at gunpoint. It is no coincidence that Eggers chose to start here and have Achak tell his story over the course of 24 hours as flashbacks to the past: contrasting the violence he experiences in America to that of Sudan is very telling. As the African part of the story unfolds, it casts a harsher and brighter light on the working poor and the criminally-minded of America, a critical eye and a disgusted shake of the head.

A recurring theme in the story of his past is one of inflated hope and disappointed expectations. The Lost Boys come from primitive villages and they know nothing about the world outside of Dinka land. They can't even conceptualise what Ethiopia is, the idea of another country, but they build up grand expectations in their heads, which are based on nothing more than wishful thinking in the face of extreme privation. Moving to America, the refugees are possessed of even more fanciful imaginings, the kind that are limited to your scope of experience but also take them to the heights: servants, bowls of oranges, palaces and so forth. It's not their fault they had no real ability to grasp what it would be like, or their lack of perspective. They learned quickly, but not all of them were successful in their new home.

By many we have been written off as a failed experiment. We were the model Africans. For so long, this was our designation. We were applauded for our industriousness and good manners and, best of all, our devotion to our faith. The churches adored us, and the leaders they bankrolled and controlled coveted us. But now the enthusiasm has dampened. We have exhausted many of our hosts. We are young men, and young men are prone to vice. Among the four thousand [that emigrated to America] are those who have entertained prostitutes, who have lost weeks and months to drugs, many more who have lost their fire to drink, dozens who have become inexpert gamblers, fighters. [pp.475-6]

I rather think he's a bit hard on himself, or society is. Take a group of people from a primitive place with little to no creature comforts, who have endured things for years that we can barely fathom, and leave them more-or-less to their own devices in a strange new world full of new temptations - and let's face it, the United States is proud of the "freedoms" it offers - and you'll get instances of abuse in many forms. You can't fast-forward industrialisation, progress and change in all facets of life like that without some repercussions. That's a lot to take in. Even us westerners who grew up with the advanced technology and conveniences that we're used to, aren't dealing with it very well.

Deng's story is a long one, and it's by no means a quick read. Highly involved, reflective and introspective, it more-or-less flows chronologically but not always, and dates are fluid - not surprisingly, since they didn't keep calendars and don't use our system of months and days (they would know what season they were born in, and can count backwards to know how old they are, more or less, but couldn't tell you their date-of-birth by our calendars). His story fleshes out the horrors of the Sudanese Civil War more than any other book I've read, and makes a long-lasting impression on you intellectually and emotionally.

One of the philosophical musings is captured in the title, What is the What, which comes from a Dinka legend about God and the first man and woman. God offers the Dinka people a choice: they can have cattle, or the What. They choose the cattle, and consider them the blessed, favoured people, for their cattle are everything: milk, food, wealth, land. Meanwhile, God gives the What to their Arab neighbours. Whenever Achak had heard this story in the past, the What is simply why the Arabs are inferior. "The Dinka were given the cattle first, and the Arabs had tried to steal them. God had given the Dinka superior land, fertile and rich, and had given them cattle, and though it was unfair, that was how God had intended it and there was no changing it." [p.63] But when his father tells it to some visiting Arab merchants months before the war arrives, he leaves is open-ended, and leaves his young son thinking. Achak finds himself asking people on his long journey, what is the What? What did God give the Arabs that he didn't give the Dinka? The answer is never given but it is implied. The sense that I got is difficult to articulate but it goes something like this: the Dinka got a harmonious, largely peaceful way of life, left intact for millennia, with no ambition or curiosity about the world. The Arabs got the ambition and curiosity, a drive to better themselves and an unending sense of dissatisfaction. The What was the apple of knowledge in Genesis' garden of Eden.

I would love to hear the story of how Achak Deng met Dave Eggers, how the plan for the book - the proceeds of which go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which builds schools in South Sudan - came about. When we leave Achak in Atlanta after his harrowing 24-hour ordeal, he has made some important decisions and revised his aims and also seems to be possessed of a new kind of conviction, but it sheds no light on what happened next. Clearly, or so it seems to me, it wasn't Deng's determination to get a degree that made things happen for him so much as the book, this book, and all the work he did to promote it. The job of starting a charitable foundation and getting things done is a daunting one to me, but I am full of admiration for the people who come from nothing and successfully do it (the subject of Linda Park-Sue's fictionalised memoir for children, n  A Long Walk to Watern, Salva Dut, also began a foundation to bring water to South Sudanese villages).

This is a hard book to read and an equally hard one to talk about. There's a lot going on and I can see why there are so many reading guides floating around the web. I loved it on many levels, even though it's not an enjoyable novel - though there are moments of humour, it's so interwoven with tragedy that it's hard to crack a smile. It's a powerful novel for the way it tells the story, and for the story itself. It's a deeply human story, shedding light into the cracks and crevices of a part of Africa that we generally don't spend much time thinking about. Checking out Deng's foundation website, it stirred me nearly to tears to see the progress he's already made on the beautiful school in Marial Bai, to read about the school farm and so on. This is a life, and what a life!