By Kai Maristed

Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger turns a devastating childhood experience into a fearless, searching work of moral and psychological clarity.

 Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno. Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer. Seven Stories Press, $22.95.

Neige Sinno is of that French generation born to free love, back-to-the-land, dropout-from-the-bourgeoisie parents. It’s a thing: The brilliant novelist Michel Houellebecq, for one, wrote of gross neglect in the hippie compounds of his early childhood—although on reading Sad Tiger he might concede that Sinno has even more to be bitter about. Not that she goes near what for her would be an emotional trapdoor. Yet, being human, she is tempted. Yet again, being formidably intelligent, she sees through the door’s outline to the abyss below. Despair.

Sad Tiger is straight-up nonfiction. Part exploratory essay and part rigorous attempt at documentation, biography, and autobiography, all centered on the defining event of Sinno’s existence: domestic rape, from when she was seven to about fifteen, at the hands of her stepfather. Subject matter that until the current generation of writers was pretty much taboo. But her book is neither today’s ‘auto-fiction’ nor memoir, terms that denote a fashionable sort of massaged autobiography spiked with reality-adjacent scenes and fictional dialogue. In fact, the manuscript that went on to bestsellerdom, while garnering some of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, was at first rejected by multiple publishers as unmarketable. Perhaps because of this, the forty-something year old author’s third book, has no interest in seducing the reader. If anything, the opposite. But once begun, its novelistic complexity, vivid revelations, and fierce hunt for truth, for the possibility of truth, draw you in and onward.

The mother of Neige and her little sister Rose (fairy-tale names—the parents refusing to abide by the authorized French list of first names) left their sweet but feckless father, fell hard for a man then killed in an avalanche, and soon thereafter found love and presumed safety in marriage to a mountain guide and rescuer who had two kids of his own. ‘Rural hippies,’ living on meager earnings and handouts from the more prosperous farmers who took eye-rolling pity on them, they nonetheless cadged the down payment on a crumbling alpine house that they would be reconstructing throughout Neige’s childhood and adolescence, living first in the basement, and then in one large finished room. Cold, but free, in the glorious mountains.

Chapter 1: Portraits.

Subtitle: Portrait of my rapist. Opening lines:

“Because for me, too, when it comes down to it, the thing that’s most interesting is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head. With victims it’s easy, we can all put ourselves in their shoes. Even if you’ve not experienced it, the traumatic amnesia, the bewilderment, the silence of the victim is something we can all imagine, or think we can.

“The perpetrator, on the other hand, is a different story. Being in a room alone with a seven year old child, getting an erection from imagining what’s about to happen. Saying the words to make the child come closer, putting the erection in the child’s mouth, coaxing the child to open wide. That is fascinating. It’s beyond comprehension. And after it’s over, getting dressed, going back to family life as if nothing had happened.”

There, that’s over with. I’ve let Sinno deliver the reality shock, so I don’t have to. But of course nothing is over with. The child’s ordeal, and Sinno’s analysis of its societal, legal, and personal (person-destroying) consequences, are only beginning. From the get-go her curiosity knows no boundaries; she turns the victim script on its head by launching an attempt to coolly portray her tormentor. As others saw him. As he saw himself. She notes that fiction from the point of view of the perpetrator—the murderer, serial killer, etc.—is a stock in trade, but there is nearly nothing from the point of view of a rapist, let alone a rapist of children. Not surprisingly, this quickly leads to one of the most engaged, subtlest readings of Nabokov’s Lolita that I have ever encountered. Lolita is a masterpiece she will return to throughout the book, and which provides this epigraph: It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint, as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

Are you still with me, Reader? Or have you turned away from this sordid subject matter, as I nearly did when the book was proposed to me for review? Haven’t we wept sufficiently, been sufficiently revolted by reports of sexually abused children in recent years, from the Church scandals to the Epstein files, and in literature from Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison through Christine Angot and Dorothy Allison, down to the Goncourt Prize-winning Annie Ernaux, whose recalled suffering is an apparently inexhaustible font of inspiration? (These writers and others are quoted and discussed in Sinno’s pages.) But I chanced on a copy of Sad Tiger in a Paris bookshop, and read that first fragmentary sentence. To start a book with the word ‘Because’—Chapeau, I thought, a writer with chutzpah; she goes her own way. And then there was the fact that Sad Tiger won the Goncourt des Lyceens, because that prize, voted on by French ‘high schoolers’ (but the lycée goes to age nineteen or twenty, so these are mature young readers) is arguably as important as the stuffy, insider-traded Goncourt itself, or maybe more so. And it tells you what kids who care about literature want to read.

Back to the story, then.

If we squint, we can almost see the stepfather (who is never named, unlike her real father, Sammy, whose dwindling, precious visits are life-changing. Sammy teaches her to ride a bicycle, to swim, to read.) The resident man of the house is a muscular hero, ‘with high moral standards.’ rescuing hapless tourists in the mountains, and a bully given to fits of rage when he loses at a board game. A handsome hunk. Charismatic. Loud, brutish. Devious, following little Neige into the bathroom. Bold. Entering her bed, the others sleeping only a few feet away. Shh. I love you. Our secret.

We almost see him. “For years I thought of him as godlike. [..] Who wouldn’t rather think of themselves as the victim of a Titan than a loser?”  The author gives up on the portrayal. “I can’t do it. […] I’m trying to stick to some hypothetical objective truth that I can’t grasp, despite the photos and lingering memories. […] And then of course it’s impossible, because it’s him.” And yet, up to the end of the book, she will persevere in trying. He is an enigma, a threat, a monster. Perhaps a monster to be pitied? She needs to understand.

To understand why it happened, and why to her. (Oh, that unshakable sense of guilt, of ‘I brought this on myself,’ although one rationally knows better. An early subtitle is: Portrait of a Nymphet.) To understand what it did to her. To others.

Author Neige Sinno. Photo: French Library

The history, apart from its horrors, is fascinating. How he managed to carry on undetected for so long in such close quarters. And why (as her own daughter will ask, near the book’s end) didn’t she simply tell someone? Because when you are seven, eight, nine, and he threatens that one word would ruin the family, leave Maman defenseless to care for (now) four children with no money at all—Neige must bear this responsibility. Remain silent. Later it’s a twisted form of pride, as she washes the dishes with mother and friends prattling over tea behind her: If you only knew. Penetration has been added to fellating in pre-puberty. The first time, despite the pain, she was glad. Because what he does to her, what she is part of, finally has an unambiguous name: Rape.

Why to her, Neige, and none of the other children? Because he loves her. And she at six, refused and will always refuse to love him back. Cold shoulder. No cuddles, no kisses. In his trial, this is his defense. I loved her, I offered her my protection. She turned away—

Because, you notice, she did finally ‘tell.’ After she’d left home, headed to a stellar academic career. And again, the motive was to protect her much younger siblings. Although no motive can be that uncomplicated. Now her mother bore the brunt of shock, pain and guilt. Her brave mother wrote out a formal complaint of child abuse, alongside the one filed by Neige.

What happened during and after the fourteen-hour trial? To the accused? To his accuser? I’ll let you find that out in Sad Tiger, in Sinno’s telling. Her voice shines in the prose, clean and bright, incisive even when questioning. Hers is the voice of a poet and a scholar. And while it doesn’t sound unusual in the English translation (masterfully tuned, by the way) in French this unadorned yet syntactically impeccable, direct address to the reader is unusual—and refreshing.

One of my favorite subtitles is: Reasons for not wanting to write this book. A few entries:

— I don’t want to specialize in rape literature.

–I’d like to […] think about something else, have a life that is centered on something else.

— I don’t believe in writing as therapy. And even if I did, the idea of healing myself with this book appalls me.

If it is neither for other people or for me, what is the point?

You see? She can’t stop questioning. Questioning why she questions, even. But it all bears fruit. One of the hard-won, and saddest, insights of Sad Tiger (title derived from the Blake poem, yes) is that she cannot be healed. She’s praised for her achievements, her ‘resilience,’ (as if a human psyche could snap back into form, like an elastic band) and for a long time she seeks healing in literature, but even that fails in the end. Someone with her history is, simply, in her phrase, ‘damaged for life.’ Everywhere, on the bus, in the playground, even at home, she stays on the lookout for possible predators of other children. Above all, though she’s moved to the US and on to Mexico, and is happily married, he is always shadowing her. Always there. She quotes Reinaldo Arenas: “You escape from a burning house, you’re safe, you find yourself in a welcoming land. But your house is still in flames.”

At her book’s core, though, is another hard-won and, for most people, startling insight: Rape is not about the rape, at all. Rape is only a means to an end, and that end is power. Subjugation. Here she quotes Nicholas Estano, a psychologist: “Rape […] is a way of using sex to express anxiety around power and anger. […] more to do with status, hostility, control and domination than […] sexual satisfaction.” Sinno goes on, “His power over me was absolute […] my life and death were in his hands. […] A monster, once seen, is subhuman, but when no one can see him he is a king.”

Although Neige Sinno rejects the idea of therapy through writing (and I agree) one comes away from this work—marked by rigorous analysis of the facts, introspection, and fearless projection into the motivation of others—with a sense of cleansing for both writer and reader. Not that the past has been in any way attenuated or nullified. But so much more is understood, bared, and brought to light, now that the ugly crust of conventional assumptions and three decades of lies has been pitilessly scrubbed away.

Kai Maristed’s work has been published in Agni, Ploughshares, Five Points, and elsewhere. Her books include Broken Ground, praised by John Coetzee, and Belong to Me, starred by PW. This fall saw standing ovations for her full-length play, Paul and Émile. Her new, prize-winning story collection, The Age of Migration, will be out in July.