![]() ![]() By the time we reach its shocking yet ultimately transcendent ending, the story has turned into something mystical, esoteric it takes a cyclic shape. ![]() The novel, though originally written in French, is grounded in the worldview of Senegal’s Wolof people, and the specificity and uniqueness of that culture’s language comes through even in Anna Moschovakis’s translation. As violent and disturbing as these encounters are, they are rendered with such artistic grace that one derives a strange pleasure in reading about even the bloodiest of nights. He takes his character into the depths of hell and lets him thrive there. Diop realizes the full nature of war - that theater of macabre and violent drama - on the page. ![]() But this book is about more than a lone man’s spiritual burden. The narrative voice brims with innuendoes and habitual repetitions like 'I know, I understand' and 'God’s truth,' which imbue the character with an edgy eccentricity. This transgression against the dead - or the delusion of such - fills the story with a mythic affliction that recalls the old sailor’s in Samuel Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. From the very first pages, there is something beguiling about At Night All Blood Is Black, a slim, delicate novel by the Senegalese-French writer David Diop. ![]()
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