Sad Tiger
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Winner of multiple prizes, Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and is an international phenomenon.
“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it.” —Annie Ernaux
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE, FINALIST
Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.
Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.
Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt des Lycéens, 2023
Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prizes, 2024
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Medicis Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Decembre Prize, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this harrowing but arresting meditation on abuse, Neige Sinno processes her experience by struggling to understand it. For years, Sinno was molested by her stepfather, who was eventually imprisoned for his crimes. The trauma that resulted had a defining effect on her life. Sad Tiger, though, is anything but a linear account. Unbound by chronology or conventional narrative, she examines every aspect of her experiences from multiple directions through a shifting array of sources, as if continually juggling them in her mind. Trying to get into the head of her abuser, she examines his crimes and motivations from inside and out. Along the way, she alternates anecdotal passages with everything from letters and newspaper stories to the transcript of her stepfather’s trial. Sinno also leans into literary analysis, peering deeply into works by Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, and others, seeking parallels to her personal history. Sad Tiger is a rough ride with a lot to reveal about humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. Neige chronicles how her stepfather began raping her when she was seven. Along the way, she attempts to understand the mind of a child rapist, which, unlike the mind of a victim, is "beyond comprehension." Her mother dated the "tall, athletic, personable" man, who goes unnamed, for just a few weeks in 1983 before moving in with him—along with Neige and her younger sister, Rose—in a cramped basement apartment. Neige remembers how during that time, she tried to hold her pee in for as long as she could in the mornings to avoid getting out of bed and attracting her stepfather's attention after her mother left for work. She wasn't sure his assaults qualified as rape until she was 12, when he penetrated her for the first time, and she felt oddly joyful to finally know what was happening to her. The accounts from his eventual 2000 trial for raping her are especially gut-wrenching as Neige comes to realize he was attracted by "the purest innocence." Sinno's prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it's enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature. This is brilliant.
