It is Ndiaye’s voice-resonate, ruthlessly matter-of-fact, deeply wounded-which will be our light in this blood-soaked landscape of rusting barbed wire and whizzing shrapnel. Alfa Ndiaye, a young Senegalese soldier who along with his childhood friend, Mademba Diop, has volunteered to fight for the French, finds himself trapped in the nightmare that was trench life during World War One. Here story and storyteller are one and the same. Homer’s Iliad, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pat Barker’s miraculous, mammoth Regeneration Trilogy, and now, David Diop’s remarkable (and yes, fair warning, very disturbing) novel At Night All Blood is Black (translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, FSG). But he could have also been talking about the countless books that war has sired, those literary masterpieces of blood and iron and colossal suffering over which war-that great annihilator of psyche and civilization alike-has long held sway. In Heraclitus’ telling, it is we poor mortals who are war’s unhappy children, and its subjects. War, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus once said, is the father of all and the king of all.
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