Book : At Night All Blood Is Black - Diop, David

-Titulo Original : At Night All Blood Is Black

-Fabricante :

Picador Paper

-Descripcion Original:

About the Author David Diop was born in Paris and was raised in Senegal. He is the head of the Arts, Languages, and Literature Department at the University of Pau, where his research includes such topics as eighteenth-century French literature and European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His second novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, was awarded the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. *WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE**ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMAS FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021*Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fictionShortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary AwardAstonishingly good. Lily Meyer, NPRSo incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020One of TheWall Street Journals 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Clubs fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the yearSelected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diops At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness. Review Beguiling . . . Diop realizes the full nature of war that theater of macabre and violent drama on the page. He takes his character into the depths of hell and lets him thrive there . . . 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. Chigozie Obioma, The New York Times Book ReviewAstonishingly good. Lily Meyer, NPRHarrowing . . . [At Night All Blood Is Black] confronts the historical image of Black soldiers by stretching barbarism to its ironic limits . . . What seems most pointed in Diop’s novel is its exploration of what it meant for West African men to fight side by side, and to grieve one another. Emmanuel Iduma, The New York Review of BooksPowerfully original . . . Unflinching in its exploration of the madness war can induce, Diop’s novella is a remarkable piece of writing. Nick Rennison, The Times (London) The International Booker prize winner is a brilliant, shifting tale . . . [At Night All Blood Is Black] rewards rereading, which recasts the violent opening chapters in a new, even darker light . . . Quite unlike anything else. John Self, The ObserverAs in many of the best nov