Reviews

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

frankiebishop00's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

bookstore_plantlover's review

dark reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror

inari777's review

adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.5

nehanimm's review

dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

henrydavies24's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

sparker94's review

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

repobi's review

3.0

A tale of african soldier in WWI riddled with survivor guilt, ptsd, and rampaging vengeance. Viscerally written

sul_sufardi's review

challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

snaillydia's review

5.0

At Night All Blood is Black is a descent into madness triggered by loss. Our main character Alfa watches his best friend die in the first scene, and his grief slowly turns him into a monster. Maybe even literally.

This is the sort of story that leaves many doors open. We are very much in Alfa's head, and he is by no means a reliable narrator. A reading of this is much benefitted by a long discussion about it afterwards. And yet, the abundance of nuance and meaning does not come at the cost of plot or succinctness. In fact, this novel is impressively concise and effective. I think my favorite part was the exploration of the contradictory nature of war and its demands.

At Night All Blood is Black may be an eye-catching title, and it does appear as a sentence in the text, but it is not nearly as fitting as the original French title, Soul Brothers. As much as this book's beauty blew me away, after reading more about it by reviewers who read the original, I am sad to have missed some fantastic prose. The text even poignantly points this out:

To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. 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 risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.

Overall, I definitely recommend this to anyone ready to delve into some extremely dark subject matter. You will be rewarded tenfold.

tarrowood's review

4.0

A beautiful and short read that feels like watching your narrator and main character solve a puzzle, jumping back and forth in time and understanding. It has a repetitive nature that leads to enlightenment rather than redundancy