One of my ideas was to place a figure from the Age of Enlightenment, a humanist, in a sort of psychic disequilibrium. I didn’t have a clear sense of this when I first began writing. ‘Yoga’ charts true-crime master Emmanuel Carrère’s journey from intensive meditation to mental breakdown - but leaves out the divorce that derailed him.ĭid you set out to take a substantially different perspective than other writers who have covered this period? Adanson eventually joined the French Academy of Sciences, and in his younger self I found an openness of spirit, an original sort of intellectual curiosity - these traits were what made me want to turn him into a character in a work of fiction.īooks Review: Emmanuel Carrère’s new meditation memoir has an NDA-sized hole at its center He describes the people of Senegal with a remarkable eye for detail, certainly by the standards of his era. It was then that I stumbled across Michel Adanson’s captivating “ A Voyage to Senegal,” published in Paris in 1757. At the time, one of my research interests was 18th century African travelogues written by Europeans.
I first encountered the historical figure who inspired the novel roughly 15 years ago. What was the impetus of the story and how does it intersect with your academic interests? That being said, it did bring my work as a novelist to the attention of a much bigger audience around the world - something that makes me very happy, as it’s allowed me to interact with readers from a multitude of different cultural backgrounds. Well, I should point out that I also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction in April of that year! And so I found the reception of “At Night All Blood Is Black” to be very positive even before the Booker was announced. “I made the voyage to Senegal to discover plants,” Adanson recalls, “and instead I encountered people.” Diop masterfully teases out Adanson’s tale of youthful adventure and awakening. Among them, of course, is Diop, for his second novel, out next week in the U.S.: “ Beyond the Door of No Return.”ĭiop’s second novel digs even deeper than his debut into the past to explore the relationship between an 18th century French botanist, Michel Adanson, and Maram Seck, a formerly enslaved woman in Senegal.
#Author of biscuit books full
(See full list below.) The 10 nominated authors span a wide range of nations and styles, including Germany’s Jenny Erpenbeck (“ Kairos”), Colombian author Juan Sebastián Cárdenas (“Devil of the Provinces”), Mexico’s Fernanda Melchor (“ This Is Not Miami”) and Korean surrealist Bora Chung (“ Cursed Bunny”). On Wednesday, the National Book Foundation announced its longlist for translated literature. For French readers the book, “ At Night All Blood Is Black,” also provided an introduction to a little-known aspect of their own history. In 2021, a slim, incantatory novel about a West African Allied regiment in World War I won the International Booker Prize, and the world was introduced to 55-year-old French Senegalese author and scholar David Diop. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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