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