This essential feature of the human condition guides the novel and the self-revelation of Alfa’s character to the reader and himself. Even though the soldiers are commanded to kill in war, when asked to end the suffering of someone to whom they are intimately connected, they cannot bring themselves to do what they ordinarily do in war. His “more-than-brother” Mademba Diop is badly wounded in no man’s land, with his entrails spilled on the ground, and begs Alfa to finish him off by slitting his throat, yet Alfa refuses each of his three requests. The novel begins with the ultimate paradox of war, which sets off the main character Alfa Ndiaye’s slow descent into madness. Using repetition, narrative akin to stream of consciousness and a poignant yet straightforward language, Diop weaves a powerful, emotional and jarring story. Much like one of the first novels published in French about World War I, Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, Diop describes war and the experience of war in all its contradictions, brutality and realism. In Les Poilus, Gueno documents the universal experience of boredom, fear, disgust, and longing felt by a diverse group of people who made up the army in the trenches.

Diop, a university professor of 17 th and 18 th-century French literature, has written a harrowing account of the Great War, as experienced by a Senegalese tirailleur, in which the colonial experience is intertwined with the intimacy of war and the feelings of grief, guilt and fear it generates and reveals.ĭiop indicated that the idea to write the novel came to him after reading Jean-Pierre Gueno’s collection of letters written by those who participated in the War. This year’s winner of the International Booker Prize, awarded to the best book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, went to a French-Senegalese author David Diop and his translator Anna Moschovakis for their At Night All Blood is Black. Anna Moschovakis), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp.

At Night All Blood is Black, David Diop (trans.

At night all blood is black a novel