"What is the What" is the new novel by Dave Eggers, founder of the magazine and publishing house McSweeneys, Pulitzer Price nominated writer and, since his first bigger appearance at the turn of the millenium, one of America's most promising and most innovative young authors.
After his brief trip to the world of complete fiction with his latest novel, "You Shall know Our Velocity", Eggers returns to the mix of autobiographical facts with made-up story elements that he already used in his highly acclaimed debut "A Heartbreaking Story of Staggering Genius".

But this time, the story does not start in the States and this time, it is not the life of himself from which the novels contents are taken but that of an Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng by one of his few names.
Eggers himself wrote down the experiences and sufferings of this man during the Sudanese civil-war and put them together to a story under his supervision.

What disunited the critics of the nation and what was even called a 'post-colonial arrogance' (Lee Siegel) turns out to be a solid piece of prose without many surprises.
And what might sound boring to fans of Eggers' peculiar style, the inclusion of visual effects and his innovative rhetorical devices, the surprises mentioned above, turns out to be the appropriate way to tell this story: no experiments, just a thoroughly worked out narration with occasional leaps in time and place.
Valentino's youth with the early loss of his parents, his oddysee through North-East Africa to the notorious Kenyan refugee camp, finally his flight to the USA, to the promised land, and his desperate attempts to integrate himself into the daily life of Atlanta are conveyed by a precise and descriptive writing style into an intensive reading experience.