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At Night All Blood Is Black" is about the fight of two Senegalese brothers, of which one is adopted, in the French army against the Germans in World War I. When Diop is deadly wounded, and begs to be killed to stop his pain, Alfa cannot do it, yet this fact drives him slowly crazy, and requiring the ritual of killing Germans at night, re-enacting what he couldn't do to Diop, and taking each time a chopped of had as a relic, which terrifies his comrades at the camp. He slowly starts turning mad and becoming a demon in the eyes of his friends.
The first person narrator tells the story of his raids, of his village and home, of the war, of death, of the army ... His tone is incantational, with rhythmic sentences and the endlessly repeated interjection "God's truth", but then so often that it becomes irritating and even childish. Take out this interjection, and the flow of the narrative is not less mesmerising or fluent.
The book received a lot of international literary awards, including the International Booker Prize, and that is a mystery to me.
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