All hail Eggers!

I mean it now: Dave Eggers is infallible. He is part God. I love his books.

I remember meeting some guy at a creative writing conference at William Patterson University last year, and we chatted about our unconditional love of Eggers, and he said, “Dude, have you read You Shall Know Our Velocity!?” So I have been meaning to pick it up for a while now, but I needed to first finish What is the What (2007) and then his latest, Zeitoun (2009). I also saw (and wept childishly at) Where the Wild Things Are (2009), although I still haven’t read the book (it’s expensive!). So, I’ve not neglected my Eggers these past few years.

You Shall Know Our Velocity! (Vintage, 2003) starts with an appropriately Egger-ish announcement on the first page:
“EVERYTHING WITHIN TAKES PLACE AFTER JACK DIED AND BEFORE MY MOM AND I DROWNED IN A BURNING FERRY IN THE COOL TANNIN-TINTED GUAVIARE RIVER, IN EAST-CENTRAL COLOMBIA, WITH FORTY-TWO LOCALS WE HADN’T YET MET. IT WAS A CLEAR AND EYEBLUE DAY, THAT DAY, AS WAS THE FIRST DAY OF THIS STORY, A FEW YEARS AGO IN JANUARY, ON CHICAGO’S NORTH SIDE, IN THE OPULENT SHADOW OF WRIGLEY AND WITH THE WIND COMING LOW AND SEARCHING OFF THE JAGGED HALF-FROZEN LAKE. I WAS INSIDE, VERY WARM, WALKING FROM DOOR TO DOOR.”

Will and Hand are best friends from Milwaukee and have $32,000 that they must give away to those “most deserving” around the world in seven days. Emotionally unstable and disorganized, the two plan trips to several countries that they believe to be impoverished. Jack, their third and closest friend, has recently died in a car crash. Hand and Will are still mourning his death, and can’t shake memories of their childhood together, as well as the brutality of the accident. In addition to all this, Will has been recently beat-up by some people (not sure), and his face and body are visibly bruised.

The pair travel to Dakar, where they dance in trippy nightclubs, speak bad French, and are in constant fear of being kidnapped and murdered by the Senegalese. They try to tape money to donkeys for the locals to find.

They travel to Morocco, where people spit on them (thinking them French), and they practice jumping from their rental car window into merchants’ street carts.

They travel to Estonia, where they bury money in the ground and make a treasure map for a child to find it. They spend one night jumping around on tree limbs twenty feet off the ground.

They wanted to end up in Cairo and watch the sunrise from the top of a pyramid, but didn’t have time.

In many ways, Will and Hand are still boys (popular archetypes of Eggers’) who carry a chivalrous, romanticized idea of life and achievement. But they have no clue what they’re doing (at least most of the time). They take on a task wholly larger than themselves, and are completely unaware of it. But Eggers turns their unadulterated determination into beauty in this complex, but moving, narrative.

This book is about too many things: a once-in-a-lifetime trip, memory and pain, letting life come and go, and how the F-word makes dialogue hilarious. READ IT, because my review doesn't do it justice for shit.