Reviews with content warning for Rape - At Night All Blood is Black

‘This story, like all interesting stories, is full of clever innuendo. Whoever tells a well-known story like the one about the lion-sorcerer and the fickle princess might always be hiding another story beneath it. To be seen, the story hidden beneath the well-known story has to peek out a little bit. If the hidden story hides too well beneath the well known story, it stays invisible…When it’s understood by those for whom it is intended, the story hidden beneath the well known story can change the course of their lives, can push them to transform a diffuse desire into a concrete act

Of stories

And meaning

And secrets

Hidden in plain sight

Aren’t those the best deceptions?

The best works of art

The best stories

The face beneath the face

The eyes beneath the eyes

The words beneath the words

Diop is commenting about the nature of story-telling

We all draw from

life

memory

research

our pasts

from things better left unsaid

But writers cloak them in words

So that there is a story on the surface most see

A deeper commentary that many glean between the lines

And then there’s a tale that only few know was told

A story for all

Yet a story for one

Through this blood & gore soaked saga of a soldier unravelling & sinking into the method of madness, Diop untangles the many fissures of war

How it destroy’s people’s sanity

How racism classism & xenophobia are deeply entrenched even in the trenches

& shape events

How there are no winners in a war

Everybody loses some part of themselves

How victory is just an empty shell

crunched on the battlefield

beneath the heavy boots of time

But this is also one man’s story

How he loses his mind

His humanity

Himself

But was it just war that pushed him to those depths of depravity?

Or had loss eaten away his soul long before?

Was war just the last straw?

Was his incapability to be temporarily mad like the others who threw themselves in the line of fire & clear commitment to hunt more apt?

Was his violence towards women a product of war?

Or was it rooted much deeper in how he viewed women & himself?

Was he the lion?

The hunter?

Or just a phantom of the man with the pen

‘The hidden story has to be there without being there, it has to let itself be guessed at, the way a tight saffron-yellow dress lets the beautiful figure of a young girl be guessed at. It has to be transparent.’

The blatant objectification of women in this part that I left out from the initial quote & many such passages say something not just about Alfa or Madema, but Diop

How he views women - objects that are either consumed or plundered

How men write women - the fickle princess or the mute mademoiselle

And how it severs them from becoming truly human

Much like the severed trophies that the protagonist collects

Or was that another hidden message Diop had tucked in all along?

Translated wonderfully from the French by Anna Moschovakis

Content Warnings

danielles_reads's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

Thanks, I hate it.

I hate the repetition (the phrase “God’s truth” is mentioned 150 times in this 145 page book), I hate the constant comparisons to women’s sexual organs, I hate the senseless violence subjected to both men in the war and women who are not, I hate the random backstories, I hate the vague opaqueness, I hate the ending.

Yes, war is violent, but I’m tired of reading men’s war books. I thought this book would add a different perspective, since it’s about a Black man fighting in WWI for France, but it disgusted me even more than other war books I read from the typical white point of view.

The captain was disgusting and I don’t want to read about people who think the made-up concept of a state is more important than the lives of real people. The narrator was disgusting and I don’t want to read about someone who rapes women and talks about how moist their insides are. God’s truth. And somehow Alfa’s friend is alive and in his body because he really is a soul stealer. Okay. I know, I understand. Not.

This book made me mad. Do not recommend. I’m really annoyed it won awards. Fuck that.

The extra half star is the only recognition I will give for what I think Diop was trying to do with this book. I can see some of the themes he was going for, but I just didn’t enjoy this reading experience at all.

Content Warnings

ew_rat_rai's review against another edition

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dark reflective medium-paced

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

4.25

Content Warnings

teainthelibrary's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective 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? Yes

3.25

Content Warnings

buecher_und_huehner's review against another edition

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dark tense

1.5

I should preface this by saying that I finished the book only a few minutes ago, maybe I should let it sink in a bit more before I write this review. But I want to write it now! There is already a review here that says something along the lines of "The first half was disturbing but very well written - then the book just nosedives off the rails." Mhm, agreed. The second half is quite confusing, I often was not sure what I was reading, why I was reading it and why I was reading it now... But at the very beginning of this short novel, I thought we might be looking at four to five stars. The book drops you in media res and lays the gore on thick, right from the get-go. But you don't pick up a book about WWI because you are in the mood for something light and fluffy, so I did like that aspect. Then the repetition set in, I don't think there was a single (full) page without the phrase "God's truth". But okay, yeah, soldier in the chaos of war trying to make sense of what is happening, trying to hold on to his sanity as it rapidly slips away, maybe trying to convince himself that he really is doing the right thing, I get it. But it wasn’t only that phrase that was constantly repeated. So, the writing style did not seem to be my cup of tea, I saw myself knocking off maybe half a star for it, this is a personal review, after all. But what brought my star rating tumbling down, apart from the confusing second half, was how the book talks about female bodies. The trenches being compared to “the slightly parted lips of an immense woman’s sex […] offering herself to war, to the bombshells, and to […] the soldiers […] ready to receive [the returning soldiers]” was jarring the first time, but I read a lot of literature about WWI and especially in texts written at the time sexual aspects combining with war is not actually that uncommon. So…okay…bit weird for a text written 100 years after the war, but okay… Good research...? I don’t know… But for f’s sake! The soldiers being “born out of the earth” at every attack?? I mean, yeah… birth imagery, when the attack actually brings death, but how often can you use one uncomfortable metaphor in a text of not even 150 pages?? Once would certainly have done it… And I get it, the protagonist is not just hurtling towards madness, I would argue that by the beginning of the novel he is already there, and like I said, sexual motives in that context are not new. But there is no comparison of, I don’t know, a bayonet or a bullet to a penis… It’s only the female body being objectified… And then, after firmly connecting the trenches to a vagina, with soldiers splurging out from it at every attack, the book describes actual sex scenes (no, one sex scene, multiple times), repeatedly mentioning how Alfa “explores” Fary’s “warm and moist insides”. Oh come on! And eventually this whole warped imagery around women is topped with…well, check the content warning…

Also, Alfa is an arrogant prick who thinks the sun rises only to shine on him and he is the greatest guy that those around him ever beheld. But that shrinks to a side note …

So… I am not sure why, out of all possible contestants, this book won the 2021 International Booker. It makes some very good points about the senselessness and the warped morals of war and often phrases those points beautifully, but so do several other novels and I wish I'd spend my afternoon reading those instead...

Content Warnings

qqjj's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense 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? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

angelaaaa's review against another edition

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dark 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

3.5

Content Warnings

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