What Is the What

The title, from an African creation myth, is also a metaphor for making sense of an alien world. Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng escapes his homeland, spends years in refugee camps, and then emigrates to America. The novel is told with a touch of humor, without which the brutality of Deng's experiences would be hard to take. Dion Graham's accent sounds authentic enough and colors the reading without overpowering it. He catches Deng's mystified wonder as he tries to make sense of the contrasts he discovers in American life. Graham also moves fluidly from Deng's African accent to urban-American black accents. The novel's first-person point of view is compelling. Graham does it justice as he takes listeners into the story. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from October 30, 2006
Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval.