PositiveFiction Writers ReviewTrue to its title, the stories here are all told in the first person, and are presented to us in the tonally flat yet somehow peculiarly expansively affect with which readers of Murakami’s past work will be well familiar. Oddness abounds ... oddness aside, it’s those moments when the characters in Murakami’s collection connect—either in scene or through the shifting kaleidoscope of memory—which make the best stories in First Person Singular shine ... As good as these stories are, there’s a few that fall flat ... where Murakami truly shines in this collection is where he always has as a writer: when what’s on the page departs reality, when it embraces the odd and the strange. And when, in the midst of that dreamlike strangeness, we find human connection.
David Diop, tr. Anna Moschovakis
PositiveFiction Writers Review[A] remarkable (and yes, fair warning, very disturbing) novel ... while there may be nothing particularly new or revelatory in Diop’s assertion that war sometimes transforms men into monsters, what does feel new, and what makes At Night All Blood is Black a welcome addition to the oeuvre, is Ndiaye’s voice. Here, finally, is a novel about World War One told from the perspective of those soldiers who left their villages in Africa and India to fight alongside the French and English ... Sadly, the novel loses a little traction in the final section, after Ndiaye is sent off to recover in a French psychiatric hospital ... it does leave the book’s ending a bit untethered, I’m afraid, and may likewise leave some of its readers grasping for answers. And yet where At Night All Blood is Black truly succeeds—and succeeds marvelously—is when it simply allows us to witness the experience of those soldiers like Ndiaye whose stories, until now, have gone untold.
