INTERVIEWS WITH DAVE EGGERS AND VALENTINO ACHAK
DENG
Skyline College Library
BOOK REVIEWS about What Is the What
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INTERVIEWS WITH DAVE EGGERS AND VALENTINO ACHAK DENG ON What
Is the What
"It was just boys walking ..." / Dave Eggers. The Guardian (May 26, 2007): Guardian Review Pages, 4.
BOOK REVIEWS ABOUT What Is the What
"The most demanding part of the task must have been to stand away from the subject matter and allow it to breathe. Eggers has been so successful at this that What Is the What acts, if nothing else, as a triumphant rebuttal of Martin Amis's method for House of Meetings, a book in which the author's need to add literary value tended to obscure the very facts he was writing about." "The art has gone into throwing Valentino's voice." "It would be a mistake to think that Dave Eggers has given up irony. What he has done is to send it deep into the text where it can do its work."
"The lost boy" / Francine
Prose. New York Times Book Review (December 24, 2006): 1ff.
“Truly Heartbreaking: In his new novel about a Sudanese refugee, Dave
Eggers delivers nothing short of genius.” / David Amsden. New York Magazine (Oct
22, 2006).
"Dave Egger's triumphant act of witness: guilt
and irony are at the heart of What is the What" / M. John Harrison. TLS:
The Times Literary Supplement 5437
(June 13, 2007): 20.
"Valentino was Deng's baptismal name. Deng met the same priest years
later, in one of the camps, and the priest told him he was named after St
Valentine, who cured a girl of blindness. 'I think that you will have the power
to make people see. I think you will remember what it was like to be here, you
will see the lessons here, the priest said. The priest was right."
"This
is not that place" / Thomas Jones. London Review of Books 29, 12 (June 21, 2007): 23-24.
"That a story so concerned with so many different forms of dispossession
should itself be subject to a variety of appropriation is not unproblematic,
and requires a more positive justification than mere silence."
"Questions of authorship and ownership aside, the result is a remarkable
book: harrowing, witty, wretched, delightful; and always compelling, always
surprising.
"The niceness racket" / Lee Siegel. New
Republic 236, 14 (April 23, 2007):
49-53.
"Just one more instance of the accelerating mash-up of truth and falsehood
in the culture" "Innocent expropriation of another man's identity is
a post-colonial arrogance."
"Children
of war" / Dinaw Mengestu. New Statesman 136, 4847 (June 18, 2007): 60-61.
MORE
RESOURCES ABOUT What Is the What:
What Is the What official website
Valentino Achak Deng Foundation
last revised: 9-25-08
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