Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno – reviewed

Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger is a raw and unflinching account of the sexual abuse she endured as a child at the hands of her stepfather. With devastating honesty, she explores the pain and lasting impact of that trauma. And reveals the final horror such abuse can inflict.

Sad Tiger, Neige Sinno’s account of her own abusive childhood has taken France by storm, and has now been translated by Natasha Lehrer and published in the UK.

It has won multiple awards, including the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina and the Le Monde Literary Prize in France, the European Strega Prize in Italy and other prizes across the world, including in the UK and USA.

Years of abuse

It is hard to know where to place Sad Tiger. Is it a memoir, an autobiography, a prose poem? In many ways it is all of these, and the writer herself struggles to define it as she writes.

The basic facts of the story are clear enough and sadly not unusual. A young girl is raped and otherwise sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of seven until fourteen.

A story told in images

Neige Sinno relates her story in a series of images as she translates her life into word portraits.

A portrait of her rapist in which she finds herself unable to pin down the reality of this man. Portraits of herself, from her memories and as she may have been seen through his gaze. Images of her life as dramas in different genres – horror, melodrama, the elusive truth.

Happy endings?

To the outside world, this is a story with a resolution. Neige Sinno was raped as a child; as an adult she reported the rape to the authorities; her abuser was arrested, tried, confessed and was jailed.

She went on with her life to become a writer, translator and mother. As happy an ending as such a story can expect, right?

Wrong. As Sinno makes clear in this shattering account, the public outcome of her story does not begin to reflect the truth of child rape and sexual abuse. The abuse does not go away with the jailing of the perpetrator.

She even questions the value of prison for such men, for anyone. She reported him to keep other children safe. His conviction and punishment give a false resolution. To Sinno, for victims and for herself, there are no resolutions.

‘Every decoding is another encoding’

Even the accounts of the events of her childhood, in one way so simple, are in other ways too complex to be explained. The same events can be represented in thousands of different ways by the impossibility of pinning down true meaning in language.

As David Lodge has his character Morris Zapp say: “Every decoding is another encoding. The writer can put the words out there, he or she cannot dictate the meaning the reader will take from them.”

A struggle with identity

Neige Sinno struggles to identify herself. Is she the same person as the child she was and who is in her memory?

Memory itself is not linear. The abuse may have ended, but it still remains in her head.

There are too many different stories here, and she notes that her stepfather, who remains unnamed throughout the book, is almost admired for his honesty, even by those working in the field of child sexual abuse.

It is as if, among the many examples of such men, he is one of the more admirable offenders, an example of lesser abuse, even though he subjected his victim to forced oral sex, rape and sodomy.

Sinno reflects in detail on other accounts of child sexual abuse, from the fictional in Nabokov’s masterpiece of deception, Lolita, to the more recent accounts of real-life abuse.

The myth of the seductive child

Nabokov’s book, she points out, has been endlessly misunderstood. The image many people have of it is the story of a sexualised child. This is how Lolita appears in the film and on book covers, knowing and seductive.

The book, however, presents a very different story. We see Lolita, and the events of the book, through the warped gaze of Humbert Humbert, but even then, the hideousness of his actions and his awareness of this underlies his words.

Lolita is his victim, trapped with her abuser by the death of her mother and by his threats. It is the decoding of others that sexualises Lolita.

A topic to be avoided

Lotita, however, is fiction. Sad Tiger is fact. The sexual abuse of children, the denial, the lack of proper protection and monitoring – all of this underlies Sinno’s story.

Writers of popular fiction genres are often advised by editors to steer clear of certain topics as readers will avoid them.

There are very few novels written about child sex abuse, especially from the point of view of the abuser, and in many of these, the abuse is part of a plot device to explain motivation.

A M Holmes, The End of Alice, is told through the eyes of a female abuser of young boys, but fails to convince.

An unspoken truth

Sad Tiger may be multi-award winning, but it splits the jury on reader sites such as Goodreads, probably because it flouts expectations. People have expectations that memoirs about child abuse should follow a certain format, they should express only certain emotions, and that, above all, they should not be exploitative or gratuitous.

Sinno’s book is neither of these, but she is also brutally honest. The book can be hard to read. Some of the accounts she gives of the abuse her stepfather inflicted on her are graphic. How otherwise can she explain the outrages that were committed against her as a child without this? They may be graphic, but they do not titillate.

She also talks, with careful emotional detachment about the sexual arousal her stepfather forced on her.

A rape of the mind

This is a dark secret about rape, and one that can cause the victims the most shame: the fact that they felt sexual pleasure during the attack. This possibly may be the worst aspect of sexual abuse, the rape of the mind as well as the body.

Neige Sinno refuses to feel shame for what was done to her, but also acknowledges that it probably changed the course of her life, and will stay with her forever.

In my novels Life Ruins and Someone Who Isn’t Me, a young woman damaged by her stepfather’s sexual abuse is, like Sinno, unable to name her abuser. But unlike Sinno, unable, yet to face the memories. However, the shame and rage haunt her and are preventing her from getting on with her life.

Sinno gives a powerful account of the ongoing damage such abuse causes.

Sad Tiger is a memoir, an essay, poetry. It is an exploration of time and perspective, of crime and justice. It is a beautifully written, very dark book about the brutality that some people can inflict on children and the lack of appropriate consequences our society has with which to respond.