A boy lost in Africa

What is the What cuts through the strata of criticism, and gets straight to a fundamental question, one which echoes the title: What is a novel? The plot is the journey to Ethiopia, Kenya and finally America of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, but what makes this ‘novel’ unusual is that Valentino is a real person, who told his story to Dave Eggers over a number of years. Eggers now presents it in a voice pitched to approximate that of his subject. The reason this is not called a memoir, however, is that some passages are fictional, although the real Valentino himself states in the preface that they are faithful to the overall tenor of events. This, then, is a book at the crossroads of forms, one which takes issue with the very labels ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.

The Valentino of this book is living in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the course of a day and a half, he is beaten up and robbed in his apartment, before being left tied up, and then waits vainly in a hospital for 14 hours, finally making his way to the gym where he works, for a 5.30 a. m. start. During that time he silently addresses his life story to the people he encounters, the burglars, the hospital workers, the insomniac exercisers.

He was born in Marial Bai, in the south- west of Sudan. His father, a shopkeeper, was wealthy by local standards, but neither Valentino nor his friends owned even the most basic accoutrements of a Western child. When he was only six or seven (he is not entirely sure of his age), civil war broke out. In his explanation, rebel soldiers fled to Ethiopia, and in retribution the government hired Arab mercenaries to gain revenge, which meant the murder and rape of southern Sudanese citizens, whom the rebels were seen as representing.