PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksLike many novels about the Western Front, it puts the horror of trench warfare front and center. The book’s incantatory gore makes it a critique of war along the lines of All Quiet on the Western Front, but in Diop’s hands something else is also going on ... It’s impossible to read this book without thinking about the ugly history of severed hands in Africa. The cutting off of hands was a feature of colonial conquest, most famously in the Congo Free State ... Alfa’s collection of hands, which he keeps in his trunk until burying them one night, calls these histories to mind for the reader. But to what end? Are we to conclude that Alfa has internalized the cruelty of colonialism? That Europeans didn’t have a monopoly on chopping off hands? Or is this just a grisly tale of personal revenge? ... Diop’s book is morally inscrutable, and as a meditation on war, race, and colonialism, it cuts like a dull knife. Are we to cheer on the protagonist as he obliterates German soldiers? If so, are we cheering for him because the Germans are the enemy, or because he is a subaltern taking a bloody, personal revenge on Europe? Or are we to indict him for his cruelty? Diop gives us no landmarks to orient ourselves in the no-man’s-land where he sets his story—a brave decision at a time when many readers demand moral clarity from stories about the past ... Diop’s book probes the difference between the \'legitimate\' violence of battle and the kind that is taboo or dishonorable. In one particularly affecting scene, Alfa’s hand-cutting is juxtaposed with a gruesome execution of a group of soldiers for cowardice by their French commanders. Why do the norms of war deem one of these things \'civilized\' and the other not? The line between them, Diop shows, is drawn not by the nature of the killing, but by who is doing it.
