From the very first pages, there is something beguiling about At Night All Blood Is Black, a slim, delicate novel by the Senegalese-French writer David Diop ... This transgression against the dead — or the delusion of such — fills the story with a mythic affliction that recalls the old sailor’s in Samuel Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The narrative voice brims with innuendoes and habitual repetitions like 'I know, I understand' and 'God’s truth,' which imbue the character with an edgy eccentricity ... But this book is about more than a lone man’s spiritual burden. Diop realizes the full nature of war — that theater of macabre and violent drama — on the page. He takes his character into the depths of hell and lets him thrive there ... As violent and disturbing as these encounters are, they are rendered with such artistic grace that one derives a strange pleasure in reading about even the bloodiest of nights. The novel, though originally written in French, is grounded in the worldview of Senegal’s Wolof people, and the specificity and uniqueness of that culture’s language comes through even in Anna Moschovakis’s translation ... By the time we reach its shocking yet ultimately transcendent ending, the story has turned into something mystical, esoteric; it takes a cyclic shape ... More than a century after World War I, a great new African writer is asking these questions in a spare yet extraordinary novel about this bloody stain on human history.
... astonishingly good ... Alfa understands that his revenge is growing ghoulish; he understands that France as a colonial force is exploiting his bravery and his grief; he understands, even, that he is in part responsible for Mademba's suffering, which is perhaps the novel's most harrowing thread. But Alfa's understanding cannot free him. He is, in effect, doomed by his own comprehension. Diop's prose, which is at once swift and dense, captures that effect well. He and his translator, Anna Moschovakis, wall the reader into Alfa's mind and his story, refusing even the smallest glimmer of light.
Alfa’s rhythmic, repetitive oaths and laments; his pleas for understanding and forgiveness; his description of the trench as 'open like the sex of an enormous woman, a woman the size of the earth,' out of which men leap screaming to kill: all give the narrative both a suffocating intimacy and a sense of a nightmare too vast to escape ... While the physical setting is circumscribed—trenches bracketing no man’s land, with flashbacks to a village life that seems infinitely far away and long ago—the moral scope is immense ... I want to say it’s our human duty to read this book, which students across France chose to win a scholastic version of the Prix Goncourt. Listen to this voice that takes us into the madness of massive violence—with the warning that its vision of human duty offers no closure and much soul-searching.
A stunning new novel about the plight of two Senegalese soldiers in the Great War offers a fresh perspective. It also introduces a singular talent ... Though short, it is an immersive, propulsive read, one that searingly evokes the terrors of trench warfare, the relentless loss of life, and the irreparable damage inflicted on the human soul ... Diop's dark fable isn't all blood and guts. His protagonist takes time out to reflect on the village life he left behind, and his relationship with family, friends and the woman he loved. But it is the scenes of mayhem and the portrayal of delusion that have the biggest impact. Employing language that is, by turn, visceral and lyrical, Diop tells a devastating story of loss and inhumanity while enlarging our understanding of the war to end all wars.
... shortlisted for ten French literary prizes—deservingly so. It is an intense exploration of the dehumanising effect of war and colonialism. This slight book explodes with extraordinary force—readers will not forget it in a hurry.
Reflecting on his actions, and his past, Alfa uses a simple and straightforward style, hardly dispassionate but also not losing itself to the horrors of the acts he commits and the terrible war conditions he lives through -- or, for that matter, the absurdity of the situation he finds himself in ... A nice touch is how Diop allows Alfa to present himself: he is not tortured in the way one might expect, given what he is experienced, he does not behave like a raving madman. Even in hunting down German soldiers he shows himself to be patient and quiet, seemingly complete under control ... a solid variation on the First World War novel, a glimpse of less well-known experiences and an interesting spin on personal trauma. A good personal portrait of a different kind of soldier, it's a bit slim but certainly packs enough of a punch; it is effectively harrowing.
One could recommend this novella by its name alone. Fortunately, what its evocative and ominous title hints at—a dark story told in lyrical prose—is more than delivered on in David Diop’s rhythmic, enchanting fiction (expertly translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis) ... Diop occasionally finds black humor within the undeniable darkness of the story, but more than anything he shows just how slippery the self can be when individuals are placed within extraordinary, violent circumstances.
Like 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.
At Night, however, is ultimately more ghost story than hysterical picaresque. It is at once a deeply violent and gentle book. Blending modernist monologue with myth, Diop explores the disturbing outer limits of what we do to others, and of what war can do to us ... At Night All Blood Is Black extends and revises this recognizable style into something unique. It’s a leaner, sparer book than Céline’s or Hasek’s, more haunted than antic. The narrative is voice-driven and deadpan in the face of brutality, but Diop’s irony accents the chilling over the tragicomic. And while earlier responses to World War I emphasize the meaninglessness of life in the face of wartime horrors, At Night insists on a twisted logic of devotion ... there is great beauty here. Diop’s sentences have a tidal quality, carrying in phrases worn smooth with repetition ... a stunning iteration of the very oldest stories about the plunders of war.
As Ndiaye’s very identity begins to crack and slip, the brilliance of David Diop’s conceit becomes clear and the reader must reconsider the story backward as well as forward. That is why it has appealed to so many prize juries: it rewards rereading, which recasts the violent opening chapters in a new, even darker light. If the measure of a book’s success is to be quite unlike anything else, then At Night All Blood Is Black deserves the bouquets and trumpets after all.
[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.
... brutal ... translated elegantly ... a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure ... Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog ... In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions ... A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled ... By interlaying the real and the mythological planes of existence, the novel draws an elegant parallel between the processes of victimization and demonization.
David Diop’s new novel, At Night All Blood is Black (tr. Anna Moschovakis), combines a war story with allegory and myth ... The incredible lies not in the actions Alfa describes, gruesome though they are, but in Alfa’s chilling interpretations ... At Night All Blood is Black is translated with economy and sensitivity by poet and translator Anna Moschovakis, who is particularly successful at rendering Alfa’s feelings of foreign-ness into English ... In the end, translation itself becomes a subject ... What and who is being translated, and by whom? Is it the man society deems mad, who may in fact speak the truth? Is it the way in which the African views the white man? Or, most important, how the white man translates the African into a monolithic image of brutality, an image that begets violence and lasting damage? Diop’s novel poses these questions, with the stark implication that the white man’s destruction runs so deep that it destroys not only whole societies but also humanity itself.
David Diop’s powerful novel, not much more than novella length, is full of echoes and portents ... Translated from the French, the text revolves around recurring images and verbal tics, as though Alfa is trying a series of keys to unlock his troubled psyche ... With elegant brevity, Diop presents a world with no firm dividing line between courage and madness, murder and warfare.
... unexpected musical cadence to the harrowing tale ... Diop gracefully backtracks to the early friendship of the two men, with Alfa acknowledging his haughty behavior toward Mademba the morning of his death as the novel veers toward a transcendent ending for them both ... Paris-born, Senegalese-raised Diop’s second novel is scalding, mesmerizing, and troubling in the best way. Highly recommended.
Diop's short but emotionally packed second novel illuminates an underreported chapter in French and Senegalese history. Part folklore, part existential howl, and part prose poem, it is a heartbreaking account of pointless suffering ... A searing, eye-opening tale of innocence destroyed.
... harrowing, nimbly translated ... memories of a difficult childhood and delusions of a nurse’s desire for him add depth to Ndaiye’s narration, yet also spur him to commit one final heinous act in a brilliantly handled twist. Diop is sure to earn readers with this feverish exercise in psychological horror.
