What's what? Fiction and non-fiction

One of Dave Eggers' narrative principle, his Romae design based on a true, guaranteed by a person living history. So also in "What is the What", the "autobiography" of Südsudanflüchtlings Valentino Achak Deng. As a young boy Achak isolated in incipient civil war from his family. He believes his parents dead and joins other refugees. Together with thousands more, many boys (the Lost Boys), but also families, he goes (on foot!) First to Ethiopia and then to Kenya. He grows up in flight and in refugee camps. On 11 September 2001, he will eventually leave Kenya gene USA. But his life in America will not be careless.

Are packed in a story like this complex political developments more easily understood. You are more memorable than any newscast. In short, the (previously on Sudan only rudimentarily informed) reader learns much about this conflict. Dave Eggers has fashioned the biography of Achak Deng artfully into a novel. Reading the book, despite the more than 500 pages very entertaining.

The problem of the book is obvious. Eggers would like to inform this novel the Western reader on the (South) Sudan. In the novel, consequently, much is "explained" (Achak tells his story fictional American counterparts). The informational intent is more than clear. At the same time the novel is unmistakably an artifact. Much will arrange and condense within the meaning of the story. This means that one can not distinguish between fiction and non-fiction as a reader.

As with Eggers novel "Zeitoun" me has the moral exemplarity and gesellschafltiche integrity of the protagonist increasingly annoyed. It seems that Achak has no flaws. Of course Eggers must set the "donors" of his stories a positive monument. Otherwise no one would cooperate with him. However, given the novels not as good.