The Real World

Sometimes it's better to stay silent. To keep your thoughts to yourself, or at least think before you act or say something. Often, sharing thoughts helps you clarify what you actually think. If not just that, sharing thoughts makes people carry each other's burden. Or, as Dave Eggers puts it, by sharing your thoughts with others, you create a lattice - the more people, the bigger the lattice - over which your burden will be diffused and thus your life will be easier. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is just that. The author greatly embellishes - and is extremely aware of this - his memoirs into a grand allegory of suffering.


It was two weeks ago in a Sunday Observer that I read about Dave Eggers' new work, What Is The What. I thought I'd heard of this guy before - or his name is just really interesting - so thought I'd read the whole piece. His latest novel is again a memoir, now from the perspective of a Somali refugee, based on an actual refugee Eggers has interviewed in the past few months. The article hinted at his earlier A Heartbreaking Work... as an emotional account of personal loss combined with the troubles of suddenly having to bring up a child. For some reason it attracted me.

The style is reminiscent (or prescient?) of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (J.S. Foer), in the sense that the author needs to describe everything as much as possible and goes off on tangents never to return. As time passes, the book becomes obsessively self-involved and -referential, in a way that characters only seem to be suitable physical representations of the author's other self, whilst he is having a personal argument. Luckily, this generally leads from confusion to amusement, especially when a ten-year-old boy tells off his brother (Eggers) in a way only college students with a humanities major could.

The book is presented as a memoir, a work of non-fiction. It starts off with four near chronological chapters in which we learn about the deaths of Eggers' parents (both cancer, within a short time), and how he learnt to take care of his younger brother (Dave Eggers is in his early twenties, whereas his brother will grow from seven to early teens). Then, as acknowledged in the appropriate Acknowledgements section, glorification and embellishment take control, and any character development is lost as we're trapped inside the author's mind. Fortunately, the self-awareness-to-the-extreme saves the book from becoming completely impenetrable. Although pace is lost - as there is no clue as to where the story is going - the author guides us through interesting conversations (mostly with himself disguised as a friend or relative) and dilemmas, especially concerning writing a memoir.

This book is a hard one to place in a box. It involves thoroughly enjoyable sections - mainly Eggers' relation with his brother (or "son") and how they exploit their unfortunate situation - but at times the hypothetical situations or quasi-philosophical or post-modern self-aware and self-referential banter just becomes too much to enjoy. Thus the staggering genius:

I turn to the box.
The box is my mother, only smaller.
The box is not my mother.
Is the box my mother?
No.

Plot: **
Fun: ***
Novelty: *****
Overall: ***

I do think the book is worth more than three stars, but you will need to read the Rules and Suggestions, Preface, Acknowledgments, and Notes sections to fully appreciate the author's excellence!