![]() ![]() ![]() “God’s truth, I thought only of gutting the half-dead blue-eyed enemy. His friend is badly wounded on the battlefield and, dying in Alfa’s arms, begs to be put out of his misery. Our hero is Alfa, a young Senegalese infantryman fighting in the French Army. 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. Like many novels about the Western Front, it puts the horror of trench warfare front and center. A short, visceral book, it tells the story of an African soldier’s imbrication in World War I. David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black, originally published in French in 2018, was one of the most decorated novels of that year, winning the Prix Goncourt, and its English translation by Anna Moschovakis won the 2021 International Booker Prize. BEAUTIFULLY WROUGHT VIOLENCE makes for gripping novels and murky ethics. ![]()
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