AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACKBy David Diop

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. The narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, is an African legionnaire fighting for the French in the trenches of World War I, who tells the story sometimes in the form of sordid confession, other times in the form of sobering testimony.