At Night All Blood Is Black

"Absolutely. I read it in the original French, because I’m very erudite. No, it was really beautiful. But the reason I say so is that the protagonist in At Night All Blood is Black is Senegalese, and he can’t speak French. So the book is written in French, but the protagonist talks about how he can’t speak French. There’s an interesting passage where he talks about how translation is just a series of small lies that tell a big truth. So there’s a really weird, complex thing going on there with language, and that the translation of this French language book won the International Booker—it’s just all very meta. But that makes it sound like less of a good story than it is. I’m sure you already know this, but the premise is that it’s this soldier. He becomes very murderous at the front, and starts doing things like cutting off hands in no-man’s-land and bringing them back. At first his white superiors are like: that’s great, we need murderous soldiers. But the more he turns into a serial killer, the more his white superiors feel that, well okay, we did ask you to be a savage, but this is not quite what we meant. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The reason he’s like that is that he’s been completely broken by the things he’s had to do in this war, and especially by the loss of a friend. It’s also about how this man, who really has no business being in a wet French trench, is being completely distorted and ruined by this war. The people who brought him there, who intentionally crafted him into this savage beast are then so horrified by what he’s now turned into. It almost reads like a horror film. It’s very psychological. You really sympathise with him, right? Like you almost want him to successfully murder strange German men in the field. So it’s a very finely crafted book, beautifully woven together, and interesting from a genre perspective. I did. So these five books are the books you should read if you’ve never read any novels about the First World War. But if you’ve read those already, I have a few that are a little bit off the beaten track. The most readable of these is The Secret Battle by A.P. Herbert , which was written, I think, in the 1920s. The premise of the book is that it’s a young man making the case for why the execution of his good friend for cowardice was an injustice. It’s a really, really well-written and a psychologically interesting read. It’s about these four or five British officers in Gallipoli, their petty politics. He’s really uninterested in writing about the battles—whenever there’s a battle he’ll say, ‘there was a battle, I’m not going to go into it, you can read about that kind of thing elsewhere.’ He talks about how, when you’re tired and hungry and scared, having someone annoying in your dugout can ruin your life. So this guy starts off really brave and honourable, then there’s another man who he keeps being stationed with, and they hate each other. It just drives him crazy. Combined with the war, it serves to drive him to a position where he, as they say, bottles it. And he’s executed. That’s not a spoiler, it begins by telling you that. It’s a book about the interpersonal relationships of these four or five men at the front. I would even call it, in some way, feminine. There’s a very funny bit where they get sent to the Western Front, having just been at Gallipolli, and they are like: this is so nice! They just can’t believe how great it is. I think this book should be much more widely read, because it’s a great piece of writing. Another WW1 novel that should be better known is Alf by Bruno Vogel. This was a cool find for me, because my book has a very strong epistolary element—Gaunt and Ellwood are always writing heartfelt letters. After I wrote the draft, I found Alf , which is by a German soldier writing in the 1920s. It’s about two gentle teenage boys who are in love. They’ve acted on it, they’re in a relationship, and one of them goes to the front. They then write each other a series of letters to each other. It’s a very emotional book. The problem I have is that the only translation we have is about fifty years old, and it’s really bad—apologies to the translator, but I wish we had a modern translation. It was repressed by Hitler , so that’s one reason that no one knows about it. Bruno Vogel went on to live in South Africa, where he fought Apartheid for most of his life. He was a very cool guy. Then there’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer , by Siegfried Sassoon. He wrote three autobiographical novels and three memoirs about his experiences during the war. They’re quite slow-paced, but this is the one I’d recommend—the second of the three novels. He’s a wordsmith, the writing is just exquisitely poetic. It’s filled with insight. There’s one bit where he says: “I knew that if I could get the better of my physical discomforts I should find the War intensely interesting.” He has all sorts of little asides like that. It’s also heart-rending, because he’s quite unfair to the character that is him. He’s always talking in the first person about what a loser he is, basically, and you feel he’s being a bit hard on himself, on pseudo-Sassoon. So I find it a very touching book. The last one I would recommend, and this is less good writing than interesting historical document, is Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini. It was pretty quickly banned when it first came out, in 1918. It’s about this bisexual woman who falls in love with a gay pacifist during World War One. So it’s really quite radical. In fact, to someone reading in the 21st century, it seems very modern—there are a lot of scenes of a bunch of Bohemians at a café, exchanging political views, and the political views are basically ours. So it’s fascinating, it feels very dissonant—you think: don’t put modern thoughts into these historical characters’ heads, and then you remember, oh it’s from the time. It’s brazenly queer, which is not the reason it was banned. It was banned because of the pacifism. So although I think it fails on a literary scale, because it’s quite didactic, it’s really a fascinating insight into a group of radical thinkers in this time period."

"This book is frightening. Reading it, you feel you’re being hypnotised. Your emotions are set all a-jangle, and your mind is being opened up to new thoughts. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing—very powerful, very compelling. It’s a novel narrated by a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French army in the trenches during the First World War. There were a lot of African soldiers—in the British Army too. It’s a tale of savagery, and the associations that word conjures up are examined from all sides. These soldiers are very young, adrift in a world that is completely unfamiliar to them, with people trying to kill them. They are being encouraged to be savage by their officers, because in a time of war that is what soldiers are required to be. But at the same time, gradually, the protagonist begins to find that, because he’s such a good soldier, he’s being viewed as a savage in a much more derogatory and unacceptable usage of the word. “Translation is a very difficult literary art, not at all simple. It’s self-effacing, modest. The best translators just disappear” It’s a story about war, yes. But also a story about love—both sexual love and the love of ‘more-than-brothers’, this very moving phrase which the speaker uses often about his childhood friend who’s killed at the opening of the story. That sense of comradeship‚ the deeply loving comradeship of fighting men, is very strongly evoked. It’s also a story about language. The protagonist has really very little shared language with the French officers who are ordering him to kill and risk being killed. So it examines the barriers that have to be crossed when people from different cultures live and especially fight alongside each other. It’s a deeply upsetting book: angry and very sad. But it’s also exhilarating to read; it has an extraordinary kind of dark beauty. The author David Diop creates incantatory word music, and the translator Anna Moschovakis absolutely has managed to recreate it. I would say that this is a piece of prose fiction that does what the best poetry does: it enters the readers consciousness at a level that bypasses rationality. It has a very beautiful surface, but there’s something extraordinarily powerful going on beneath that surface—something mind expanding and terrifying and revolutionary. Well, I love straight-forward novels! I’m a fan of Anthony Trollope . There was no decision to move away from anything, or towards anything—we simply chose the books by which we were most impressed. And those turned out, in the end, to be these six books, several of which are stepping outside the limitations of what you might think of as being a ‘traditional novel’. Incidentally, the rubric for the prize doesn’t use that word, ‘novel’. It’s simply: ‘work of fiction.’ So that’s quite a wide definition. So we have a work of science fiction , a work of gothic horror, two works—by Vuillard and Labatut—which are, on the face of it, biographical, and we have Maria Stepanova. If you wanted to sum up her book in one word, you might call it a memoir. But all these books are transformed by the kind of magic of the author’s creative energy. The material might be that of ghost story, fantasy , or historical biography, but they are transfigured by the imagination and by the artistry with which they are written into works of literary art. I think that is what fiction is. But I do think that it’s not just coincidence that several of the books on our shortlist are slightly outside the range of what we’re accustomed to when we think of novels. A lot of the most exciting writers today are the ones who are working in the borderlands between different genres. You can see the academic world scrambling to keep up with this, and dreaming up new labels like ‘creative nonfiction’ or ‘documentary fiction’, ‘ autofiction ’ and what-have-you. What these labels add up to, I think, is simply an acknowledgement that these very innovative, interesting writers are simply ignoring all labels and using whatever strategies are useful to them—borrowing techniques from earlier novelists, but also from science, or cinema, or history, or music. And why shouldn’t they?"