I like the game of encoding into the mind of someone who is deliberately immoral, who knows he is destroying another person, yet who nonetheless keeps doing it…One giant trigger warning of a book, full of contradictions and contrasts, starting with the juxtaposition, of the beauty of the cover to the brutal content that follows, from the very first sentence. The devastating opening paragraphs, (we are plunged straight in with the first section heading, ‘Portrait Of My Rapist,’), hit hard, and Sinno then slides into literary criticism. But this is an analysis of Nabakov’s Lolita, with all the problems that invokes in a memoir about child abuse. How can a sufferer write so acutely, so incisively about such a book? Sinno’s analogies, metaphors and references are varied, erudite, relentless. The human soul is the dark side of the moon; abuse takes place “in another dimension…physically, the same as the one in which the rest of life happens, superimposed onto it like a duplicate of unbearable clarity.” William Blake, the Rwandan genocide, fairy tales: her voice ranges far and wide, but always returns to earth with the most basic, raw, fundamental questions – why did it happen? How do I live now? How do they? Unreliable narrators run through the text, from Humbert Humbert to her step-father rapist, and even, she admits forty pages in, when we are already caught in her emotional web, Sinno herself.I would never have thought a book on incestuous rape could be so readable, but Sinno’s art is to take a topic and view it from every possible viewpoint; literature, cinema, through the eyes of her mother, the reader, even the perpetrator himself, in a hypnotic kaleidoscope that belies her own words: “I want {this book} to exist, but I hope it doesn’t have too many readers.”Too late for that, both sadly and fortunately.
Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, (List Price: $22.95, Seven Stories Press, 9781644214671, April 2025)
Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana
