Living like a refugee

I’ve spent the last month engrossed by Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. The book is a fictionalized account of the journey of the real-life Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan: a youth displaced by that African country’s brutal war and raised in refugee camps. Eggers is author of the seminal generational memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book I also loved (and that I consider one of the first neo-parenting accounts, a major inspiration for my own book). Here he turns his keen eye, sharp intellect, and fluid craft on a less narcissistic subject — a tremendously important one. Eggers brings us inside the news we read about Africa and refugees the world over. It’s sometimes nightmare-inducing, but it’s also hilarious and Deng is a charming, modest narrator. The kind of book that will change your life. And make you want to shake our politicians by the ear until they do something about Darfur.

This entry was posted on January 17, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.