Books on Monday: What Is the What
Today’s book was in my pile for about nine months before I realized that I was never going to sit down and read a book about the Lost Boys of Sudan. I was simply never going to begin. So I bought the unabridged BBC audiobook and listened to the seventeen CDs on my daily walks for much of the fall of 2007. What Is the What turned out to be almost as upsettingly unpleasant as I feared it would be, but not quite, and at times it was unexpectedly bright. If Valentino Achak Deng is not the decent man that he appears to be here, I’m afraid that I don’t want to know it.
Without judging Dion Graham’s performance in any detail, I can say that his talents always seem to be quite easily broad enough to encompass the wide range of speaking characters who figure in the book. More than that, though, he reads the story as if he had told it a thousand times already, never the same way twice.
¶ What Is the What.