Written by: Dave Eggers

Publisher: McSweeney’s

Much of What Is the What would be deemed unbelievable in any other novel. So many boys die in such terrible ways—by bombs, guns, knives, fire, lions, crocodiles. But it’s based on the extraordinary true story of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, one of thousands of “Lost Boys” trying to flee the violence of the Sudanese civil war by walking hundreds of miles on a dangerous journey with no resources other than what he could scavenge along the way.

The novel begins with Deng in an Atlanta apartment where he’s been robbed, beaten and tied up. On the floor, nearly unconscious, he begins to mentally tell his muggers of his epic walk from his village of Marial Bai in Sudan to the Pinyudo refugee camp in Ethiopia—how he watched his village burned and his neighbors shot, heard the “wet snapping sounds” of a lion eating a fellow Lost Boy, rescued a baby attempting to nurse from its dead mother. Also, how he still managed to court girlfriends, find humor in a grim refugee camp and emigrate to the United States. From the outset, the significance of What Is the What is unmistakable although Eggers has been criticized for fictionalizing this account. But it’s the intimacy of Deng’s first-person storytelling and narration, so unlike reportage, that reveals him. As he tells the reader, “I am alive and you are alive, so we must fill the air with our words.” 

Dec. 4. Dave Eggers, along with Chip Kidd & Milton Glaser, discuss their work at 92nd Street Y.