What Is the What

What Is the What is a 2006 novel by Dave Eggers, built on the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese child who survived the Second Sudanese Civil War and reached the United States as one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan. Eggers presents it as a novel, though it rests on roughly a hundred hours of interviews with Deng and on research into the country and its history.

The book opens with the destruction of Marial Bai, a Dinka village, by Arab militias, an attack that separates the young protagonist from his family. He flees on foot with a group of boys, facing danger and hardship, and arrives at the Pinyudo refugee camp in Ethiopia, where the hopes for safety quickly fade. After a new episode of violence, the group heads for the Kakuma camp in Kenya, where Deng spends more than a decade. The novel is divided into three parts that follow these stages.

The narrative is interwoven with a contemporary frame: in Atlanta in 2005, the protagonist is assaulted in his apartment and must wait fourteen hours in an emergency room. While he waits, he tells his story to those around him, which allows the novel to address his life in the United States and the difficulty of rebuilding after trauma. Eggers writes in Deng's voice, seeking to give the reader a direct sense of his testimony.

The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was widely read, adopted by numerous universities as required reading for incoming students. Some critics questioned where Deng's testimony ends and the author's hand begins, noting that the narrative voice sometimes resembles Eggers's own. Others praised its power to give a face to a little-known tragedy.