Review: At Night All Blood is Black

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an incredibly violent book but I imagine it will be included in the Booker International shortlist (I was right,) because the language is vivid and tight, the story is not one I've read before (Senegalese soldiers fighting for France in World War I,) and it has this underlying rhythm with short chapters and repeated phrases that serve to whip it up to the frenzy of the end. But then it's like you as the reader are a part of what happens, and this is not a good feeling.

"Yes, I understood, God's truth, that on the battlefield they only wanted fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends, we're to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves....Before returning home, we must denude ourselves of rage and fury, we must strip ourselves of it, and if we don't we are no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the Captain blows his whistle to retreat, is taboo."

CW for war, murder, dismemberment, rape, racism. The trench is referred to repeatedly as female anatomy, and since the author uses repetition as a tool, if something is going to bother you once, it is likely to repeat. I mean, would it kill translators to select a book about an old lady planting a garden? Reading a lot of translated lit takes you into some dark places.

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Reading Envy 030: Bring Back the Guillotine!

Jenny sits down with Bryan Alexander (from Reading Envy Episodes 002, 011, and 019) and Steen Hansen at the Reading Envy Pub to discuss books.  It should be said that until we sat down, we had not known the books would fit so well together. Just a normal day of reading serendipity!

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 030: Bring Back the Guillotine!

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Featured books:



The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

Other mentions of books, authors, movies, and blog posts:

One of Ours by Willa Cather
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
Declare by Tim Powers
The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
The 39 Steps - movie
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Under the Skin by Michel Faber
Larry Niven
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Embassytown by China Miéville
Jack Vance
Ursula K. Le Guin
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
Bryan Alexander's blog discussion of Our Kids by Robert Putnam
Norton Critical Editions
The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Apocalypse Now - movie
Bernie Sanders
The Wire - tv series
Kim Stanley Robinson article about the Booker Awards - through New Scientist magazine (requires subscription)
Robert Graves
Margaret Atwood
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - interview with Edward Snowden

Stalk us online:

Jenny at GoodReads
Jenny on Twitter
Bryan at his blog
Bryan at GoodReads
Bryan on Twitter
Steen will remain mysterious.
 

Jenny's Library Books Mid-January

I had to post this after our podcast episode about reading goals for 2015 went live, otherwise this pile would have not exactly made sense.  But you can see my reading goals in this pile!  Doesn't January always start out that way, with great commitment to our goals?  Reading goals are no different (although I don't get tired of reading the way I get tired of, say, trying to not eat sugar.)

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash
The Absolutist by John Boyne

The top three books are not related to New Guinea! Ferrante is an author I wanted to read so much she's on my goals list for the year. Ron Rash is the January selection for the On the Southern Literary Trail group in Goodreads, and I'm always trying to read more southern literature. The Boyne is for my in-person book club and possibly the first book I've read set in World War I.  I've started it already so I can pass it on to another book clubber before we meet, because our town only has two copies total.

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961
Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age by Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider
The Asmat of New Guinea by Michael Clark Rockefeller

The rest of the books are for my month of reading in and about New Guinea, both sides.  Three books have to do with Rockefeller - the newer book, Savage Harvest, is about Michael Rockefeller's death in New Guinea.  He died there but two of the other books in the pile are his photos and his journals, so clearly some items survived! Gardens of War is meant to read alongside another book I need to request from interlibrary loan, and the Jared Diamond will be quite an undertaking. I've always meant to read a book by him, and this one happens to be about the Danu people in New Guinea. Convenient!