Books

Neige Sinno (translated by Natasha Lehrer)
Sad Tiger

When Neige Sinno read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita at 20, she was unnerved. Though drawn to its subversive content – a literary portrait of a paedophile – she wasn’t expecting to find so much overlap with her own grim history. In her award-winning memoir, Sad Tiger, Sinno analyses Lolita to better understand her experience of being sexually abused as a child. “I like the game of entering into the mind of someone who is deliberately immoral,” she writes, “who knows he is destroying another person, yet who nonetheless keeps doing it.”

Raised by hippie parents in a small French alpine village, Sinno’s world unravelled when her stepfather entered her life. She was six. This man, whose name is withheld throughout the book, promised “that if I didn’t tell anyone he wouldn’t touch the other children”. Sinno remained silent about his abuse for years to protect her three siblings. Eventually she reported it for the same reasons she’d kept it secret, giving evidence for the trial at which her stepfather was convicted. This “narcissistic pervert with sadistic tendencies” never fully acknowledged the extent of his crimes. He spent nine years in prison before starting another family after his release.

Speaking out about her stepfather did not end Sinno’s suffering: “People stopped greeting me in the village. That’s what happens when you are ostracised,” she writes. “It was I who had sullied the village’s reputation. The disgrace was ours but it was also theirs.” Now Sinno works as a writer and translator in Mexico, where she lives with her partner and daughter.

For years Sinno felt doubly alone because she could find no other intimate accounts about her experience. Nabokov’s depiction of Humbert Humbert’s psychology, his self-delusions and justifications, his refusal to see his victim’s humanity, helped Sinno to process what she’d suffered. Importantly, Nabokov allowed the child’s voice to pierce Humbert’s delusion of mutual love. “The taboo in our culture,” Sinno writes, “is not rape itself, which is commonplace everywhere, it is talking about it, thinking about it, analyzing it.” Her analysis of Lolita, and work by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Margaux Fragoso, Annie Ernaux and Emmanuel Carrère, shows how literature can be a source of insight, companionship and solace.

Sad Tiger opens with three attempts at a portrait of her stepfather. The task is impossible and the result is deliberately quotidian – “He burned in the sun and was violently allergic to pollen in the springtime” – and disturbing – he exploded during family Monopoly games, insulted his tennis opponents, flew into rages. He is self-aggrandising, boastful, a great hypocrite: “He had high moral standards which we were never allowed to breach.”

Sinno’s intimate domestic portrait falls outside the skewed legal and media coverage. “For years I thought of him as godlike, larger than life. He seemed like a mythological creature … years later, I wonder if perhaps he was just a bit of a loser who had the gift of manipulating people and exploiting the vulnerability of someone more helpless than he … I guess he was both, a Titan and a loser. Who wouldn’t rather see themselves as the victim of a Titan rather than a loser?”

Sad Tiger insists on illuminating the sordid aspects of her stepfather’s behaviour. This makes for harrowing reading and gives the book its ethical force. Even though it cannot redeem what was done to her, Sinno’s account redresses the total secrecy imposed by the perpetrator. She creates something entirely original – a devastatingly raw work of witness and a philosophical inquiry into the legacy of child sexual abuse.

Sensitively translated into English by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger interweaves personal testimony with historical accounts of the gulag, torture and genocide. This literature offered ways to think about radical evil, “to consider the guilt of the survivor, to touch the threshold of resilience”. From Hannah Arendt’s study of Nazi perpetrators, Sinno comes to understand that her stepfather’s refusal to fully acknowledge his crime is his only means of survival. Reading Jean Hatzfeld on the Rwandan genocide, Sinno sees that for the oppressed, “There is no unsubjugated self, no equilibrium to which one can return once the violence has ceased.”

Passages of Sinno’s memoir bear the hypnotically austere tone of Marguerite Duras. She questions everything: her motivations for writing, her own self-construction, whether justice can be served by a system that fails to rehabilitate perpetrators. Her recursive thought process reveals how abuse has corroded the self. “I am the person to whom this happened. Who is the I speaking here?” Abuse, she reminds us, is not a wound that heals but a form of damage that requires lifelong attention.

Published in France in 2023, Sad Tiger has since won five awards, including the Prix Femina, and has been hailed as a literary tour de force. The following year, Gisèle Pelicot brought her mass-rape case to trial in Avignon. All 51 men who raped Pelicot over nine years while her husband watched and recorded them were convicted. The trial was seen by many as an overdue reckoning with sexism and misogyny in France, a society that, as Pelicot said, “trivialises rape”.

Sinno’s unflinching focus on the acts that destroyed her childhood achieves a similar, seemingly contradictory, alchemy. Both women redirect the shame cast by unscrupulous media and legal rhetoric and cast it onto their rapists, challenging the systems that fail to condemn most perpetrators.

“What matters is not what is done to us,” Sinno writes, “but what we do with what is done to us.” Sad Tiger excavates from the child’s loneliness a searingly original work of literature and a resource for others who suffered, as Sinno did, without a witness.

Seven Stories Press, 224pp, $39.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "Sad Tiger".

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By Neige Sinno (translated by Natasha Lehrer)

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