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David Sedaris once wrote that Dave Eggers had enough energy in one of his books to power a train. Will Eggers slow the train down long enough to bring a Sudanese passenger on board?
Writer of the Pulitzer Prize finalist book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan, in his new book, “What is the What.”
A refugee of the Sudanese civil war that tore many boys away from their families, Deng joined the legacy of men who were given the opportunity to break free from the violence of their region and work in the United States. Before flying across the Atlantic, though, Deng experienced numerous bouts of violence and injustice.
Eggers, who’s “AHWOSG” was indeed a fierce ride, uses filters in his subject matter but not his writing style. Though featuring memoir qualities, as “AHWOSG” followed the author’s life after both of his parents died from cancer, Eggers breaks the fourth wall to convey his message the same way an actor breaks from a stage conversation to speak with the audience.
In “AHWOSG”, the fourth wall was often broken, the memoir characteristics were given clever references and dialogue was illustrated from memory. Eggers warned readers of this with one of the best preludes ever written in literature, allowing the willing eye to transport passages of reality to the mind of a clever imagination.
Here, Eggers takes a similar approach to Deng’s life. “What Is the What,” is a novel, Deng writes in a passage preceding the book’s body. Eggers inserted fictionalized passages into “What Is the What” to best convey Deng’s story. However, Deng writes, many of the events depicted in the book, including the civil war brutality, took place, and are a reflection of what his colleagues had to endure before starting work in the States, where problems persisted in other forms.
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house responsible for the hilarious “Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists.” He also teaches at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring and writing center he co-founded.
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