January 17, 2008
What is the What by Dave Eggers
There is so much to say about Dave Eggers’s novel What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. First: read it, it’s good for you. Good by the fact of being extraordinarily well-written, well-plotted, challenging, long long but you won’t bemoan that, tragic but not so much that you’re put off the story. For the very point is the story, the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the fabled “Lost Boys of Sudan.” Good for the reason that you’ve probably heard of the “Lost Boys” and Sudan, and it’s all mixed up with Darfur, and when you think of Africa anyway, you think of Africa. You think “over there.”
Or at least I thought for a long time, until I started seeking books and stories that would make the stories clearer, make the places and people of this vast and varied continent distinct. What is the What was good for me because I came away with an education. An incredible story too that perhaps allowed the lessons to “take” so well, but the very best thing for me about the book was not its point, its story, but its didacticism. I’ve come away with the facts, and I know a little bit more about the world.
But then the story is by no means incidental. And how well it is spun, beginning in the present and going back to the past, setting up a circular pattern, and then moving back and forth in and out of time. It’s a giant story, nearly twenty years in Deng’s life, and I respected its length. Perhaps one could have cut a few hundred pages to no great narrative loss, except to undermine the fact of this life. Talk about length, try spending ten years in a refugee camp. The shape of the narrative suits its content incredibly well, and makes for a gripping read.
Beginning with Deng in his apartment in Atlanta and a knock on the door just before his home is invaded by thieves and he is assaulted. Certainly not the standard set-up for such a story, “refugee boy makes good etc. happily ever after”. What is the What shows how hard it is to make good, how elusive is “ever after”. Ever after what?
Deng’s early life is established beautifully with an idea given to him as a young boy marching across Sudan with an army of boys. A march upon which armies, rebels and lions are a threat, as well as hunger, sickness, and exhaustion. Imagine your favourite day, he is told by their guide. A collection of all the perfect memories he’s ever known, and Achak remembers his loving family, his village, his friends, a brand new bicycle. Certainly, there is a “before”. Until Civil War breaks out in Southern Sudan, young Achak witnesses unimaginable horror, and, unsure what has happened to his family, joins the other boys on their walk toward some sort of safety in first Ethiopia, then Kenya, and then later to America.
Certainly when we talk about What is the What, we must mention Dave Eggers, but then it’s hard to even find him here. Eggers has stated that the reason he wrote a novel rather than a non-fiction book was that Deng’s voice was the great strength of the story, and the voice Eggers has recreated here certainly underlines that. One could only recreate a voice like this by listening intently, projecting nothing, and clearly this is what Eggers has done. Capturing the rhythms of this particular speaker, the trajectory of his stories, the kinds of lessons he cares to impart.
What I find so incredible about Dave Eggers, and what I respect about him, is that he’s never done the same thing twice. (He’s also an admirable philanthropist, but we shall stick to literary matters.) With all his early success, he wasn’t required to do what he’s done. But he has challenged himself, taken risks, proved his literary chops. The proof is here– the once-ironic indulgently-self-aware memoirist has written an epic tale, and all that remains of him here is the warmth, the humour, the generosity of spirit and insight.
Of course I do wonder about the political implications. What does it mean that this African man has had his story told by someone else? Why couldn’t Deng have told it himself? What is lost as we smudge the bounds of a literary life, and I am curious to see what history makes of all this. For this is a hugely significant work, and I am sure what it means will change with time, but in the meantime I would hope that the power of the novel addresses some of these concerns. That Deng’s voice wasn’t “stolen”, rather he sought out Eggers to tell the story, acknowledging that he wasn’t a writer. That Eggers tells the story masterfully, in a way a simple memoir by a lesser writer mightn’t have done. That Eggers’ name catches attention, directs it towards a worthy cause, and Deng receives the proceeds from the novel, which he is using towards his foundation.
Checking out the previous link today, looking at pictures of Deng’s visits back to Sudan and the work he is doing in his village of Marial Bai, I was moved by the beauty of the place. The greenness, the vastness, the vibrancy were not what came to mind before when I thought of Sudan, of a country that had been wracked by war for years and years. My perspective has been coloured, indelibly I would hope. And this is what reading can do, fiction in particular with all universality it implies. It’s quite simple (though not much else is)– I read this book, and it was good for me.
January 17, 2008
The kitchen sink
Deanna mentioned that axiom about every woman needing a window above her kitchen sink. She can’t remember where it came from, and neither can I. Something CanLit, I have a feeling. I remember discussing it in a class, how the character received the advice from her mother, but then proceeded to reject kitchen sinks altogether in favour of the world outside that window. Or so I think. Any chance of enlightenment?
January 15, 2008
Reading was Muscle
“And it occurred to her (as next day she wrote down) that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed.” –Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
January 15, 2008
Rosie Alert
Rona Maynard has been reading Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, pronouncing Danielle Wood as “mordantly original.” Remember Rosie? Oh, what a book that was.
January 14, 2008
Sadness and Guilt
My weekend contained best friends at brunches and lunches, perfect chocolate cake, delightful cousins, new shelving units, knitting, reading, jobs done and a bath-to-come. This weekend’s Globe and Mail was terrific. Stephanie Nolen’s “An Inuit Adventure in Timbuktu” is the most amazing piece of journalism I’ve (ever?) come across. (“I wasn’t really intending to read this,” my husband said to me, “but once I started I just couldn’t stop”.) Well-written, beautiful, fascinating, and will make you think of things you’ve never considered before.
And then the books section– G&M Books, what’s happened to you? For you’re becoming sort of wonderful, it’s true. More than an assemblage of watered-down reviews by friends of friends, and paragraph-length excerpts. The 50 Greatest Books Series is terrific, and not just because the first week’s choice is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oh it’s been done before, I know, but don’t you find that great books can be discussed forever and ever?
And then the reviews themselves, epistolary goodness. Reviewing The Mitford Letters (which I loved), Graham Greene’s letters (which I’m reading), Eleanor Wachtel’s Carol Shields book (which is a treasure), Four Letter Word (which I can’t wait for). It was as though the Books Pages had tapped right into my heart.
I’ve also really enjoyed the latest Vanity Fair, whose lives of rich and famous feature such gems of phrase as, “Robin was an ongoing source of sadness and guilt to Lady Annabel after she allowed him to enter the tigress’s enclosure at Aspinall’s.” As they say, you really couldn’t make this up.
January 14, 2008
Baby feet
Oh, for booties and wee feet. Aren’t these adorable? And I was lucky enough to have a friend with an upcoming bebe for whom to whip up these ickle shoes. Which are a bit wonky, naturally, as they were knit by me, and hopefully the bebe’s feet will be the same size, unlike his/her shoes, but alas. Made with love. I am terribly superstitious that a babe might come into the world for whom I’ve not created a knitted item, and be cursed for life. Cursed not to own a wonky knit thing, I suppose, but then these booties will forever stand as evidence that someone was thinking of their tiny feet even before they were born, and that is nice I think. Should fit them for all of about a week. And if it’s twins they can have one each, I guess.
January 11, 2008
Wonderful Things
There is turmoil at our house, as a new computer arrived (not for me). Therefore boxes of boxes are everywhere, and no one’s washed up from dinner. Also the phone was just fixed after three days of deadness, so there was catching up to do. The wind outside is blowing, and I’m afraid the house might fall down. But still, there are links.
Some wonderful DGR posts of late: discovering Grace Paley, on the Reading Cure. At the Guardian Books Blog, on enjoying arcane how-to books (which reminded me that I still have to-be-read my copy of How To Run Your Home Without Help). Jeffrey Eugenides on his new book (the anthology of love stories My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, which I cannot wait to read). And please, Chelsea C. vs. D. Huckabee.
And today’s G&M Facts and Arguments essay was amazing: “Nearly Lost at Sea”. About a love letter, returned to sender. “Inside the envelope was a typewritten note from the Returned Letter Section: ‘It is regretted that the enclosed air letter has been damaged by water in transit.” Handwritten across the note in blue ink was the explanation: “Salvaged mail from Comet crash off Elba.’ The love letter John had written had sunk to the bottom of the sea.”
Speaking of love letters: how brilliant is this, Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters. And of course, I knew as soon I glimpsed it: designed by Kelly Hill.
January 10, 2008
The History of Love
And just when I was talking about the strange ways some books sort themselves, I get inspired by Steph at Crooked House to sort the books myself. (Her inspiration via The Sorted Books Project). I started out with near-haiku, but then things got out of hand. For it seems that with book titles, one can write the entire history of love (and is it ever epic).
January 9, 2008
We all prefer the magical explanation
Have been reading/catching up. Penelope’s Way by Blanche Howard. Am just about to start What is the What by Dave Eggers, which I’ve been putting off for too long. Put off by prospect of the headiness, perhaps. Though Dave Eggers has never let me down before, and certainly the book has been buzzed about by many people I respect. I suspect I will be incredibly impressed.
And speaking of fictional autobiographies, I’ve just finished reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion. “Speaking of…” I say, for Joan Didion’s fiction similarly seems to challenge the fic/non-fic divide. Now I am such a fan of Joan Didion, and partly because she’s a bit preposterous. I don’t enjoy preposterousity universally, but I adore any woman who can embody the trait and still come off as brilliant. (This caveat thus explaining why I don’t love that Coulter person). I love Didion’s migraines, and that she went to the supermarket in a bikini and wanted a baby, and cried in Chinese laundries. And if one more person tells me that although they like her non-fiction, her fiction is disappointing, I will yawn.
Not because they’re entirely wrong– I’m not sure about that. Certainly I’ve never read a Joan Didion novel that stirred in me anything like what I felt for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but that to me is beside the point. Which it might not be. It is distinctly possible instead that I am just feeling awfully protective of Didion, but still, I think, to dismiss her fiction is tiresome.
Whether or not her fiction is enjoyable (and it can be, but in a slightly uncomfortable way) something fascinating is going on with it. Joan Didion is the one writer who completely defies my theories of fiction’s truth having more bearing on reality than that of non-fiction. I am not sure I fully understand it, but it’s something in her coldness, her acuity. In her non-fiction Joan Didion assembles the world and lets it speak for itself and it’s in this speaking that the life creeps in. Whereas in her fiction when she attempts the very same thing (for this is what she does), the made-upness is pervasive. When she assembles these made-up things, whatever speaks is more an echo than a voice. An echo of what, I don’t know. All of which is really odd. And doesn’t necessarily mean that her fiction is unsuccessful; Didion is too smart for that. Rather I think of her as treating fiction as a project I’ve still not got my head around.
January 9, 2008
Mystified
Today I’m mystified about not only the very weird fact of B. Spears singing autobiographical songs, but moreover that other people write these songs for her.
