Review: Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno
In just a few years, French literature has shocked readers with testimonies about a recurring injustice: child rape and incest. The latest release, for example, is Respect , by actress Anouk Grinberg, now 63, who was sexually abused at the age of seven (and then, incidentally, abused by director Bertrand Blier). Camille Kouchner, for her part, had accused her stepfather, political scientist Olivier Duhamel, of abusing her twin brother during puberty in The Big Family (2021); in her new book, Immortelles , her debut novel, she speaks of “impossible forgiveness,” referring to those who suffer these abuses.
This is, precisely, one of the dominant themes of Triste tigre , perhaps the most complex of all these testimonies, a text with which Neige Sinno (Vars, 1977) became known in 2023, a writer who, precisely, mentions Kouchner and has become an unavoidable literary and anthropological reference, even a legal one when it comes to the consequences, but, above all, vibrant and human from a confidential point of view.
The story recounted by Sinno, a short story and essay writer born 48 years ago in a village in the French Hautes-Alpes, is not simply about subjugation. Abused between the ages of nine (or seven, she can't quite remember) and fourteen by her stepfather, she kept the secret for years: she reported her attacker, who was convicted, and faced the shameful social consequences in her village. She emigrated and rebuilt her life with her partner and daughter in Mexico, where she has lived for 18 years.
Sinno's testimony is permeated with a lucid skepticism that is moving, especially when she confesses her sense of contradiction: writing a book about something that cannot be explained or understood. Nor corrected: she doesn't believe in resilience. "An event becomes real when it can be recaptured through language," she says, and when she uninhibitedly recounts the humiliating means by which her attacker attempted to sodomize her, this act of language becomes lacerating.
In an attempt to "explain" some aspect of these perverse practices from a distance, he places himself in the perspective of the aggressor and reasons like him. He manages to notice that what prevails is a "will to control, a domination" rather than sexual desire, and, above all, the temptation to destroy innocence. And then comes the image of William Blake's tiger, "a predator, a frighteningly beautiful, fiery, and destructive animal."
Upon closing the book, which has alternately traversed several dimensions, the reader will find it difficult to reinsert themselves into their usual (let's say, normal) environment, after having been submerged in the turbulent waters of this merciless, solitary, and visceral text.
Sad tiger
By Neige Sinno
Anagram. Trans.: N. Sinno
247 pages, $25,900
lanacion
