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Rating: We have stopped asking ourselves questions. After all, asking the right questions is what makes the difference between relying on fate and having a destination. Between drifting and traveling.
Thomas, the protagonist of “Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?” by Dave Eggers (released in 2015), asks himself questions, and they are the right ones, but his—and ours—has become merely an exhausted, irrational, and unconscious force. No one can assert their difference, their specificity. Perhaps that is why we feel bad. We were workers, then armies. Now we have become consumers. “What do you want to build? The world has already been built.” There is nothing to build, nothing to destroy, as the congressman seems to say, one of the ten people kidnapped and chained to a post by Thomas. “It’s the joke you’re living in.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a man over thirty to whom nothing has ever happened. […] There’s no project for anything,” Thomas explains to Sara, the girl kidnapped on the beach to become his first project for “something.”
We no longer have memory of an origin and belonging. Once, precariousness was natural. One grew up with the sensation that the world exerted resistance; it wasn’t just there for the taking. Nothing was owed. Today, we live the opposite movement: as soon as a small difficulty arises, we are unable to face it. We live a realism that has nothing to do with reality, as if it were an abstract construction. A magical realism in which every map precedes what it describes. People once knew very well what it meant to take risks, to react, to be alone; thus, they knew suffering while simultaneously training themselves for reality, not enclosing it in abstract possibilities. Ultimately, the way we slowly carry something forward creates the way we think and consequently our language.
In Thomas's outbursts, there is the fragility of a postmodern young human being called to the test of a blurred, digitized, emotionally and sentimentally unstable existence. There are the dangers, the traumas experienced as children in families and schools, especially in relation to adults. There are dreams and illusions. Confusion and disorientation. We are told that the food we have always eaten is bad for us. It turns out that the wars that were supposed to ensure our peace generate more enemies. That the healthcare system not only fails to assist but becomes complicit. It seems that everyone simply obeys new and distorted forms of human engineering. Without asking questions. Without deviations. Without stopping to reflect on eternity, on beauty, or on pain.
That is why it takes so little to discourage us. We are so fragile. Our mothers will never understand this, Thomas. We have been prepared for a life that does not exist and has never existed. We do not exist. Cold winds at thousands of meters in height or hundreds of meters in depth make us ill. We don’t hear any sigh inside our shell. No echo. Nothing survives anything. We live in the paradox of Master Juang: at night, we dream of being butterflies, then we wake up and no longer know if we are men who have just dreamed of being butterflies, or if we are butterflies dreaming of being men. What are you? Man or butterfly?
Real traditions, knowledge, gratitude are truly created if young people are shown ready to understand, digest, and assimilate. They must be asked the right questions. True hopes, intense dreams, intensely lived, no longer crystallize except here and there. But we are not a blank slate. We are alien slate, unpredictable matter. A mixture of light and dark, of future and nothingness.
The external world and Thomas’s individual dimension come to touch in the story of his friend Don Banh, a confused and angry Vietnamese boy (nothing more) killed by ten armed police officers in his garden, whose death is subsequently covered up with the help of doctors. It is again the congressman who explains that “what happened at the hospital is something different. It is not human. It is not primordial. That’s why we don’t understand it. It is a more recent mutation. The things we all experience, love and hate and passion, the need to eat and scream and make love, these are the things every human being has in common with others. But there is this new mutation, this ability to interpose between a human being and a small issue of justice, and then blame some rule. Maybe say the form was filled out incorrectly.” Thomas's doubts, therefore, have universal pretensions and seem capable of breaking down certain barriers between public and private. “I’m pretty sure I would have turned out better, and that everyone I know would have turned out better, if only we had been part of some universal struggle, some cause greater than ourselves.” Being part of something larger. Perhaps the goal of our times is precisely to keep us away from certain pretensions.
Personally, I am amazed by the lucidity, irony, apparent simplicity, and depth of this book, capable of capturing what is, in effect, one of the hot and pulsating centers of that part of humanity called “millennials,” young people in search of fragments and particles that push us to gaze at portions of the world still unexplored.
The world that begins to be glimpsed in this fluid, rapid, hungry, and confused era, capable of seeing the rise of people like Lionel Messi or Alt-J, but also of swallowing the future and prospects of millions and millions of young people in a few simple unanswered questions. Who am I? What is my life? What are you hiding beneath my eyes? When did I start to depend on pain, to inhabit it? It wouldn’t go away; it never went away. What was I supposed to do if not inhabit it? I just wanted to be treated with tenderness and listened to.
It is a book of only dialogues in which Thomas demands answers, thin not with a growing, strong, and elastic thinness, but with the abulic thinness that lost loves bring, that angularity of betrayed loves. A remarkable point of arrival in Dave Eggers’s artistic journey, which, from the individual and autobiographical concerns of his first book, (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2001) through sometimes naive but always clear, original, timely, and increasingly universal works and messages (What Is the What, 2007, Zeitoun, 2010), has reached themes of global geopolitical and economic character in the Beckettian A Hologram for the King, 2013, and in The Circle, 2014.
Where man seems to have become a disruptive element within reality, a mere ghost created by man. A kind of bacterial culture, an aggregate of genes that tends to reproduce itself infinitely. But Rilke already said it, and Mario Rigoni Stern recalled it in one of his last interviews: one day we will go searching along the roadsides for everything we are throwing away.
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