Name: Chris Dailey's review of At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
Item: At Night All Blood Is Black
Rating: 4
Author: Chris Dailey

David Diop

Selected by students across France to win the the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.

A Novel

At Night All Blood Is Black

Ausrine Blazyte

To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it's to cheat, it's to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God's uth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.

The prize-winning story of a Senegalese soldier in the trenches, told in hypnotic, powerful prose.

loisesya

Irdha C

WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction "Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR "So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.

Chris Dailey

Intense and dark novella about a Senegalese rifleman set during the Great War. Told from a single point of view, we find the protagonist who just lost his adopted brother in combat devolve into inhuman machine of war. Themes of friendship, tradition, family and colonialism are overshadowed by the intensity of war and its dehumanizing effect of its participants. The novel is insightful into the participation of colonial soldiers and provides a fresh perspective on an old topic while being chillingly macabre.

A Times historical fiction book of the year, new in paperback - the prize-winning story of a Senegalese soldier in the trenches, told in hypnotic, powerful prose.

Tsamarah

Natalie

A slim and surprisingly lyrical novel about the horrors and consequences of war, brilliantly told through the guilt-stricken and increasingly deteriorating psychology of its narrator. This book deserves a careful reading, and lingers long after its enigmatic conclusion.

Deepika Ramesh

It was brutal, beautiful, wild, disturbing, mystical, until the last two chapters. I can’t understand what happened there. I feel a wee bit disappointed. But on a day when I feel braver, I will return to this little book.

Ziggy

terrifying and haunting and poetic and visceral and gorgeous

Beautiful writing. At first was feeling a little repetitive, although it just goes to illustrate his mindset. Loved learning more about the main characters family history and life experiences through his drawings. Of course the end was so confusing later follows with a little mind-fuck moment. Will need to continue to analyze. Would re-read.

Sarah Panek

Garrett Jansen

This is a fairly quick read that I found thanks to Obama's summer reading list. Wasn't sure what to expect when going in and didn't do much research, but what I found was a brush with grief and what it means to be an adult. Before you even know much of the setting, you feel the weight of Alfa being unable to perform a mercy killing of his boyhood friend. The storytelling is masterful, only briefly allowing you to stray from that enveloping grief.

Fraser Simons

Interesting and thought provoking. Pretty different read for me. I don’t typically read about war because it’s almost always tropey. This, however, was anything but. It grows more complex and interesting as you go on, and the final chapter was really great. The story feels like it’s morphing and so different and that makes you look harder for the answer. I enjoyed that a lot.

The only thing I disliked, which unfortunately needled me constantly, was the repetition of information already given to the reader. It creates a unique cadence but it’s really annoying retreading so much ground, especially in the first half. Just constantly circling the exact same thing that happened. Not in a new way either. Just exactly the same thought in the way that telling a story form memory sometimes will do. But just like with dialogue, the reader doesn’t need that aspect to understand; or I feel I don’t anyway. Ultra Realism is not a particular quality I like in dialogue, nor other aspects of fiction. We decide what we look at in a scene with intentionality, so it bugged me a lot. Otherwise it’d probably have been a 5 star read or a 4.5 rounded up.

KADY BURNS

A short but very heavy book. Took me way longer to read and process than I assumed a book with less than 200 pages.

Raya 

Lydia Enge

Alex

Lorelei Petcu

Alexia Cambaling

The prize-winning story of a Senegalese soldier in the trenches, told in hypnotic, powerful prose Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? At Night All Blood is Black is a hypnotic, heartbreaking rendering of a mind hurtling towards madness.

Irdha C &
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

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Irdha C &At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

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Irdha C &
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop