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

Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

32 reviews

fatimasiddiqui's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad 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? It's complicated

3.25

basically the end was a psycho type situation which is interesting i guess but now seems cliche bc i made that connection

overall a really disgustingly harrowing book especially in the first half. its a hard one to rate because while it is really interesting its also not something i enjoyed reading at all because of three things:
1. the writing is so repetitive even though its brilliant at times - i swear the book would've been 50 pages shorter if it wasn't so repetitive.
2. my audiobook narrator was using the most annoying breathy voice to read the book
3. the subject matter is so gory like i never want to read the word disembowelled ever again

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awaywiththefairies's review against another edition

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dark sad fast-paced

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

2.5

I was really hoping to get behind this story. A tale of war, grief, violence and a struggle to keep our humanity. This book fell short of my expectations to say the least.

It's a short book but goes on forever. The story follows a character that starts to unravel after what he has done in this war zone though I see no struggle on his part to keep his humanity. Thought of as an animal by his forst behaviour, this seems to encourage him or even jsut make him give up and he begins to act and think like one.

A random SA scene in it with glorifying language made me question why it was even in the book. I really dislike when authors do trauma for trauma sake. Perhaps this was to say the character has always been a bad person? One can only debate on that..

A book about a man who looses control, not much growth or plot happens other than that and I really don't know why its won the prize it has. Its well written, for what it's worth, but the unexplained or resolved addition of triggered content isn't something I can get behind.

I feel like it needed to be much longer to really express this character.
Despite all its attempts to shock us, it was just a bit boring too.

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innastholiel's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

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

3.5

I’m a little torn about this one, to be honest. I really enjoyed the writing, it’s very compelling (God’s truth, repetitive though it is). But what I don’t enjoy is the weirdly objectifying sexual imagery. Like, I get it, the trench is your home and because your mommy left when you were a kid you think of it as a womb, so you think of its entrance as a vagina, but still. It’s weird without really making a point. I really would like to pretend that there is a legitimate reason for including this imagery that I’m too dumb to understand because I’m not a literary academic, and I want to pretend that this isn’t just — to bring my own gratuitous sexual metaphor into it — society having a boner for objectifying women and seeing them suffering. Of course both of those things could be true, but if it’s only one of them, I think we all know which one is the more likely candidate.

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bookishbrenbren's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

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

3.0

Alfa, a young Senegalese man, goes to France with his best friend to fight in WWI and loses both his friend and his sanity in the process.

This was a good examination of war and trauma and defense mechanisms brains struggling with PTSD will use to protect themselves. I enjoyed the fusion of, like, oral storytelling mechanisms? If that's how you'd call them. The commentary on racism at the front was also very well written and well-incorporated into the story but, on the whole, I just really mostly feel like WTF did I just read? Like, no plot all vibes, but also there is some plot but secondary to the story?

Also, the MC raped a female character for symbolism and I just didn't find it all that necessary to promote the author's point. It feels like this whole story was about how these Senegalese men were duped into war, which in the author's point is the ultimate act of victimization, of violation, and then he holds up an actual rape and is like "we're both raped now" like oh nice you really got back at those racist colonizer french aristocrats by raping this random white woman. Shrug.

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sneha_m's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-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

4.5

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sydneylive's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad 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

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emmelinelc's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective medium-paced

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

3.5

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wellfedpages's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

‘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

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