At Night All Blood Is Black
A Novel
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4.0 • 91 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE*
*ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021*
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Diop's harrowing, nimbly translated English-language debut takes the form of a 20-year-old Senegalese soldier's confession of his experience fighting for the French in the trenches during WWI. Alfa Ndaiye, conscripted in exchange for citizenship, spends hours squatting beside his mortally wounded best friend and fellow "Chocolat" Mademba Diop, who begs Ndaiye to show mercy and kill him. Ndaiye cannot bring himself to do so, and his aching regret ("Ah, Mademba! How I've regretted not killing you on the morning of the battle, while you were still asking me nicely, as a friend, with a smile in your voice!") jump-starts a monologue of Ndaiye's dive into mania. To the disturbance of Ndaiye's commanding officer, Ndaiye begins claiming spoils from the "blue-eyed enemy": their rifles and the hands that held them. The white French think he's a "strange" Chocolat; while his fellow Chocolats call him a "d mm, a devourer of souls." It's an intriguing racial dynamic, though the narrative is a bit aimless until Ndaiye is transferred to a field sanitarium. There, 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.
Customer Reviews
Flows inevitably into despair.
Beautiful. Stirring. Graphic. Distressing. Memorable. This is one of those stories that demands a second reading.