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the Complete Review
the complete review - memoir



Sad Tiger

by
Neige Sinno


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Sad Tiger


Title: Sad Tiger
Author: Neige Sinno
Genre: Autobiographical
Written: 2023 (Eng. 2025)
Length: 215 pages
Original in: French
Availability: Sad Tiger - US
Sad Tiger - UK
Sad Tiger - Canada
Triste tigre - Canada
Triste tigre - France
Trauriger Tiger - Deutschland
Triste tigre - Italia
Triste tigre - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • French title: Triste tigre
  • Translated by Natasha Lehrer

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-crafted literary take

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Bookforum . Spring/2025 Elias Altman
Le Monde . 25/8/2023 Tiphaine Samoyault
NZZ . 26/9/2024 Rainer Moritz
The NY Times Book Rev. . 1/4/2025 Lauren Christensen
TLS . 26/1/2024 Natasha Lehrer


  From the Reviews:
  • "Sad Tiger is not what you’d expect from a memoir about sexual abuse and trauma. (...) Sinno refuses to be hamstrung by genre, choosing a balletic approach, as if only a choreographed dance around her subject, again and again, will properly encapsulate its blast radius. (...) What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked. (...) Sinno’s book is remarkable for another, related quality. It’s suffused with ambivalence. Does she contradict herself ? Very well then, she contradicts herself." - Elias Altman, Bookforum

  • "So ist Sinnos Buch ein permanentes Ringen: mit den eigenen Erinnerungen, mit der Frage, wie die Ichs ihrer Lebensphasen miteinander verbunden sind, und natürlich mit den Auswirkungen des Prozesses gegen den geständigen Stiefvater. (...) Trauriger Tiger ist ein überzeugendes Buch, weil seine Offenheit bis zum Schluss durchgehalten wird und seine Verfasserin nie um Mitleid heischt. Und es ist ein kluges Buch, weil Sinno über die gesellschaftlichen Implikationen von Vergewaltigungstaten reflektiert." - Rainer Moritz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

  • "Sad Tiger eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. (...) Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse. (...) It is excruciating to read the author’s vivid chain of associations, her tortured effort to understand her own attacker a generation ago." - Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

  • "Reading and writing is how Sinno makes sense of the world, but she wonders nonetheless what her purpose is in writing this book (.....) Triste Tigre is not a work of fiction, but it is partly about the uses of fiction, as well as its limitations. (...) This is also a book about reading. Interwoven through Sinno's crystalline prose is a bricolage of texts" - Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Neige Sinno's stepfather sexually abused her, from soon after he first met her, when she was six, until she was well into her teens; in Sad Tiger she reflects on the violation and its aftereffects. Unsurprisingly, she feels a great deal of ambivalence -- including about writing this book, writing:

I want it to exist, but I hope it doesn't have too many readers. It would mean existing in literature not for my writing but for my subject. The thing I have always dreaded. And that it should be of all things this subject, which I did not choose, or want, or create. It would mean existing in literature not because of something I have done but because of something that someone did to me.
       She even makes a list of: 'Reasons for not wanting to write this book' as one of the subheadings in the first of the two chapters (or parts) of the book has it. But writing -- and literature -- are a basic touchstone for her: academically gifted, well-read, she repeatedly also turns to others' literary takes on the subject, quoting from and discussing works including Nabokov's Lolita and Virginie Despentes' King Kong Theory. She also points out that:
it's true that once you can talk about the trauma, it means you have been slightly set freee. But this does not mean that words or literature function as therapy. Quite the opposite: Writing can only happen once the work, or part of the work, has been done, that part of the work that consist of emerging from the tunnel.
       From relatively early on readers know that justice of a sort has been served: there was a trial, the perpetrator was found guilty and spent time in jail -- though, sentenced to nine years, he only served five. As Sinno notes, the case was relatively unusual: "one of the rare examples of an accusation that is seen through to sentencing". As she eventually reveals, finally reporting her stepfather to the police and filing a complaint -- when she was twenty-one -- was something she did only when she came to see that as the only solution, not least to protect her two younger sisters and brother from the man's possible predation. Opposed to incarceration generally, Sinno then also argued against imprisoning him, wishing simply that he: "be prevented from having contact with us and made to undergo treatment"; perversely, while he was in prison, the two children he had with Sinno's mother: "were obliged to visit him. It's the law. [...] They were minors and their father had the right to see them".
       The two chapters/parts of Sad Tiger are titled 'Portraits' and 'Ghosts', each divided into short sub-chapters. The opening already gives a sense of Sinno's approach, an attempt at a somewhat distanced, analytic view, as she begins her exploration by focusing on the perpetrator rather than herself, wondering what the hell led him (or can lead anyone) to do such things. (Hence also her interest in Lolita, and how its narrator presents himself and his actions.)
       The shadow of the perpetrator is, of course, impossible to ignore -- to the extent also that:
     That's another reason why it's hard to write about this. Not because it brings back painful memories (a person who was abused as a child has no need for a book to bring back painful memoires, they are lying in wait every morning upon waking), but because the text, into which the author pours so much effort and will, years of reading, her heart and soul, is, from the very start, the abuser's project, he is right at the heart of it, he almost predicted it, even almost hoped for it.
       This seems particularly true in this case, as, when charged with these crimes, her stepfather did not deny them, with Sinno noting that probably the main reason why he was convicted was: "because he confessed and acknowledged the facts" (though doing so while also making excuses).
       There is, fortunately, relatively little graphic detail in Sad Tiger -- though Sinno does offer some disturbing bits -- but everything about her stepfather's actions is a deeply troubling perversion of sex, down to the fact that:
It was obvious to me that I had never at any point consented, which my stepfather confirmed. On the other hand, he never stopped until I came. I remember concentrating to make it happen, or it would go on for an eternity. He took pleasure in giving me pleasure against my will.
       As she reminds readers, rape is: "primarily an issue of power rather than of sex" -- and so also: "Being sexually abused is a form of submission that impacts the very foundations of a person's being", an added layer that Sinno and all victims have to deal with.
       Sinno mentions a friend of hers discussing her situation with a psychiatrist, and saying, when asked how Sinno was coping: "She's studying, she reads a lot, all the time"; the psychiatrist thinks this is a good outlet ("she'll get through this with books"), but Sinno knows otherwise:
I wanted to believe it, I wanted to believe that the kingdom of literature would welcome me like yet another orphan who found refuge there, but it turns out that even through art it is impossible to defeat despair. Literature did not save me. I am not saved.
       Nevertheless, with Sad Tiger has clearly taken a step further and beyond -- not to any sort of (in any case impossible) healing, but to some understanding of the role and place of these horrible but shaping experiences in her life, now and moving forward (not least in her role as mother, which she also discusses some).
       The disturbing subject matter can be difficult to take, but Sinno's forthright exploration impresses, and provides insight -- to the extent possible -- into both victims and perpetrators of such experiences -- even as, like so many awful things humans do to each other, much about them remains unfathomable.

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 October 2025

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Links:

Sad Tiger: Reviews: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       French author Neige Sinno was born in 1977.

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© 2025 the complete review

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