What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel

#279
Title: What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel
Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2006
Country: Sudan
569 pages

This is one where the audiobook was superior to the print book. I have tried several times to read this, but the sameness of the tone put me to sleep. Dion Graham's narration brought it alive.

To the question of whether this is fiction or non-fiction, Deng's story or Eggers's conceit, my impression is both/and, not either/or. Like many (auto)biographies, events are re-arranged and dialogues imagined in order to heighten tension and symbolic relationships. Here, Deng's story is told as a series of internal monologues directed to people he encounters in the course of about a day, which provides a structure on which to hang the theme that when people look at him, they do not see his experiences. This is certainly an artificial framework imposed by Eggers, but it provides a plot on which to hang Deng's story of his life in Sudan. This format allows types of exposition that straight autoibiography might not. Since Deng asserts in the introduction that the events are accurate, it may be best to treat this as what Audre Lorde calls "biomythography," with a healthy dose of ethnography.

Audiobook here.