Please vote for the book you would like to read and discuss. In the French-Senegalese author David Diops novel At Night All Blood Is Black, which earlier this month won the International Booker Prize and has just. The rumour which grows among his fellow Africans is that Alfa is a ‘dëmm’ or devourer of souls, which only feeds his grandiosity. In this atmospheric debut, a young Native girl investigates the mysterious disappearance of women from her tribes reservation. Like Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister. After all, the French captain has encouraged the Africans to play the part of ‘savage Negroes, cannibals, Zulus’.

The night before call-up, the village beauty, Fary Thiam, granted Alfa her sexual favours, and his account of the way she ‘opened the interior of her body’ takes on a disturbing tone.įor a while Alfa’s fellow soldiers, both Toubab (white) and Chocolat, applaud his antics and laugh at the grisly trophies he brings back to the trench. After seeing Mademba’s guts, ‘slimy as freshwater snakes’, tumbling from his belly, it suddenly strikes Alfa that their trench resembles ‘a woman, open, offering herself to war, to the bombshells, and to us, the soldiers’. 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. Over the course of his self-justifying narrative, Alfa says ‘God’s truth’ so often that the notion is drained of meaning. The narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, is an African legionnaire fighting for the French in the trenches of World War I, who tells the story sometimes in the form of sordid confession, other times in the form.

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. David Diop’s powerful novel, not much more than novella length, is full of echoes and portents. 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.

At night all blood is black a novel