Sometimes, good fiction, like a good Hollywood film, can do more than a thousand textbooks to drive home and personalize an issue in the headlines. In recent times, “African” movies like Hotel Rwanda and Blood Diamond have popularized the general—genocide, the diamond trade, child soldiers—by dramatizing the particular—a brave man’s attempt to reunite with his family, say. In the same spirit, some recent novels have tried to engage a wider readership in issues affecting the African continent. Although the great novel of Darfur has yet to be written, in the meantime there is Dave Eggers’s What Is The What, a novelization, based on interviews and told in the first person, of the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. The problems and politics of the Sudan are sketched slowly into the life of the book, until the accumulation of detail over its nearly 500 pages has you invested not only in the fate of its main character, but in the current state of affairs for his countrymen in Sudan, as well. You find yourself leaping to find the websites listed at the back of the book to find a way to explore—and if possible, to help ease—the suffering of those you’ve just finished reading about. The book is heartbreaking, uplifting, and ready-made for, well, a Hollywood feature. - Gilligan

Labels: Books