To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to betray at the borders, it's to cheat, it's to trade one sentence for another. And then at the end, a book translated from its original language states 'To translate is never simple. The book is translated, and throughout the book translation occurs for Alfa to be able to understand. I think what particularly intrigues me about At Night All Blood Is Black though is the notion of translation. I didn't particularly enjoy the gruesome descriptions of war and violence, but I did enjoy the history hidden within - is this a good thing or not? I don't know!
Regrets pile up over the pages and, coupled with the traumas of war, coalesce into a broken state of being for the young man-who thinks only of the "more-than-brother" he has lost.I'm not sure whether I'm giving At Night All Blood Is Black 4 stars because I enjoyed reading it, or because I find the subject matter and themes at play super interesting. What occurs before the very first page of the story is the death of his childhood friend, Mademba Diop, who dies slowly in his hands, pleading, ultimately in vain, for Alfa to take his life for him. Its narrator-and you will hear his name often-is a World War I-era Senegalese soldier, forced into a battle several times removed from his own reality. God's truth, now I know", the story begins. I, Alfa Ndiaye, son of the old, old man, I understand, I shouldn't have.
I know, I understand, I shouldn't have done it. Less novella and more continuous prose-poem, the book loops and curls, with several refrains that delight and, in time, frighten.
Anna Moschovakis), shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, is a slender, vivid, wildly-imagined novella on the lives fractured by colonisation and war, the second novel by the France-based Senegalese author David Diop. At Night All Blood Is Black (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020 transl.
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