IN EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM Hannah Arendt calls the transcript of the SS officer’s police examination “a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.” The ludicrous is perhaps easy enough to imagine; the humor hinges on Eichmann’s “heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him.” A party man till the end, even as he seeks exculpation by spreading blame up, down, and sideways, he appears incapable of expressing an original thought. As he assembles his prefabricated statements, he goes so far as to confuse the colloquialism for slogan or stock phrase with the one for a quote from the classics. You can always count on a mass murderer for a clichéd prose style.
In the same passage, Arendt notes that a young policeman, tasked with monitoring Eichmann’s psychological health at the Yagur prison, gave Eichmann a book newly published in a German edition: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. “After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant,” Arendt writes, reporting the entirety of his reaction: “Quite an unwholesome book.” Well, as the quote from the classics goes, there’s no accounting for taste.
While the French novelist and translator Neige Sinno doesn’t include this anecdote in Sad Tiger, her extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath, she devotes ample space to Lolita, mentions Eichmann, and revisits a trial raising profound questions about perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. She also worries over what makes a book unwholesome and knows that the horrible can be both ludicrous and humorous.
Growing up among a loose network of back-to-landers in the French countryside in the 1980s, Sinno was assaulted and raped by her stepfather from the ages of seven to fourteen. Full stop. At the age of twenty-one in 1999, Sinno and her mother filed charges against him, and he was tried and convicted, receiving a sentence of nine years. Sinno went on to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Aix-Marseille, completing a thesis titled The Writing of Anxiety in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff, and moved to Mexico before publishing a novel, Le Camion, in 2017.
Winner of several major literary awards in France when it was published in 2023, Sad Tiger is not what you’d expect from a memoir about sexual abuse and trauma. Unlike Vanessa Springora’s 2020 international bestseller Consent, say, which was also translated by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger, its title an allusion to the William Blake poem, is not a taut narrative of devastation and reclamation. At times Sinno writes with the essayistic force of Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory, at others with the vividness of Édouard Louis’s novels. She shares Annie Ernaux’s will to self-excavation and proclivity for experimentation. 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.
Divided into two parts (“Portraits” and “Ghosts”) with chapters like “My life as an American melodrama,” “Because I was raped,” and “How I talked about it to my daughter,” Sad Tiger is almost less focused on Sinno’s own story than on the phenomenology of sexual abuse, traversing the work of writers and filmmakers as various as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Allison, Varlam Shalamov, Tim Roth, Toni Morrison, Céline Sciamma, and Bernardo Atxaga to map its coordinates. Sinno has never gone to therapy and resists the notion that writing should be understood as a self-prescribed form of it. Her terse style and lack of sentiment may be signs of her doctoral interest in those American masters of restraint, or more likely the mark of a fierce mind for whom getting better is far less interesting than getting real.
IT BEGINS WITH the perpetrator. Sinno’s epigraph: “It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Who but Humbert Humbert? For Sinno, “the thing that’s most interesting is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head.” An animating force of the book is the search for this kind of self-reflective insight on the part of her own abuser, something that would help illuminate the man who whispers to a little girl to draw her close, “putting the erection in the child’s mouth, coaxing the child to open wide. . . . And after it’s over getting dressed, going back to family life as if nothing has happened.” Sinno announces all of this on the first page.
She gets closer than many victims to peering into the mind of her perpetrator. He was arrested, held for a year and a half while awaiting trial, and found guilty in a fourteen-hour proceeding. (Conviction rates for sexual assault and rape in the US and France are estimated to hover in the single digits.) Add to this the fact that her stepfather confessed to many of his crimes early on and spoke with a kind of candor on the stand, and it’s a highly unusual accounting of sexual abuse. Perhaps it’s precisely her proximity to a possible explanation that leads Sinno to keep grasping for one. But she also seems to know that her tantalizing hunt will fail, her hands always coming up empty. The mind of the perpetrator is incapable of understanding itself to us, no matter the prose style. It’s slogans and stock phrases all the way down.
Many readers who followed last year’s biggest literary sexual-abuse scandal will know the type. One of Alice Munro’s daughters, Andrea Skinner, revealed that she had been sexually abused by the Nobel Prize winner’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, in 1976 when she was nine years old, and harassed after that. (Skinner told her mother about the abuse in 1992 and Munro remained married to him until his death in 2013.) Fremlin wrote in letters that his sexual leanings were “not in accordance with the canons of public respectability,” praised past cultures in which sex between children and adults was a means of education, and claimed he “did not feel irretrievably degenerate for having been sexually aroused by a nymphette” since she had been “sexually receptive and mildly aggressive.” If you tell your mother, he said to Skinner, it’ll kill her. Sinno’s stepfather said as long as she didn’t tell her mother her siblings would be spared. He claimed “a sexual relationship between a child and an adult is disapproved of in our culture, even though in other societies it isn’t a problem,” maintained the sexual education he was giving Sinno was important to her development, and in general felt “he was subject to forces stronger than he,” as if, Sinno writes, he was a victim and “I was the executioner: me, the little girl who had set off the process simply by existing.”
All this, and we’re no closer to answering the question that haunts: But how could someone do this? Would it help to fall back on a label, “narcissistic pervert with sadistic tendencies,” as the trial psychiatrist diagnosed Sinno’s stepfather? That’s less than satisfactory; Sinno considers other possibilities. “Does defiance provoke desire?” she asks about her refusal, before the abuse started, to give her stepfather the kind of I’ll-call-you-Dad welcome he wanted. Maybe it’s innocence. “That’s what there is to see, the purest innocence. And perhaps what attracts him is simply the possibility of destroying it.” Oscar Wilde once defined a bad man as one “who admires innocence.” He also said that “each man kills the thing he loves.” And then there’s my preferred reasoning, in Chinatown, a film whose subject of corruption and abuse of power is about the conspiracy to buy up land in the water-rich San Fernando valley as much as it is about Noah Cross’s rape of his daughter. When Jack Nicholson, as Jake Gittes, asks the John Huston character who he blames for the fact that his daughter is “lost” to him, he replies, “I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything.”
In the end, no answer is commensurate with the destruction. The perpetrator’s act may be thoughtless and self-contained; its buckshot impact on the victim is wide, deep, and lasting. After Arendt offers Eichmann’s one-line review of Lolita, she returns to the topic of his idiotic speech and what it really signifies, in the book’s most profound observation. “The longer one listened to him,” she writes, “the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” That’s the root of it, perhaps—of banality and of evil. True thinking is to be outside oneself while engaged in it. And since you can’t think and rape at the same time, perpetrators occupy a world in which they are the center. What a lonely place.
SINNO IS AWARE that her stepfather’s presence in her book threatens to overwhelm it, and in places he does. The mere act of writing about one’s sexual abuse, to Sinno, 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.” Because of this double-helix-like bind, Sinno says that the “cursed pair, that claustrophobic, fucked-up victim-perpetrator duo, has surely had its day.” If perpetrators are confined by cliché and victims can be stunned into self-absorption by their suffering, then there’s a limit to the stories we can listen to and learn from about sexual abuse.
To disrupt this Manichaean order, Sinno wishes for more stories from that great silent majority, bystanders, who reconstitute what must be seen as an unholy trinity. Sinno offers up two examples: Camille Kouchner’s The Familia Grande, which revealed that the author’s twin brother was sexually abused by their stepfather, the professor and politician Olivier Duhamel, and Charlotte Pudlowski’s podcast Or Maybe One Night, centered on the discovery that her mother was the victim of incest. These works tell a more complicated story by filling in the world around the victim-perpetrator dyad. It’s not exactly a head-scratcher why bystanders don’t publish more books every year about child sexual abuse. To tell these stories might entail an admission of guilt, complicity, a niggling awareness all along that something was a little off, wasn’t it?
The most interesting relationship that Sinno plumbs in Sad Tiger is not the one with her perpetrator, but rather her mother (her daughter is a close second). One day, back home from college on vacation, Sinno disclosed the abuse to her mother, who “was dumbstruck, she couldn’t think, she couldn’t grasp what I was saying.” She apparently had no inkling anything was ever amiss. Despite the revelation, she remained with Sinno’s stepfather for another year. Finally, during an angry-tearful call from a phone booth in Marseille, Sinno demanded that her mother leave him. “If there’s no other way, I’m going to the police,” she said. “And if you don’t support me, I’ll do it on my own.” After they each wrote letters to the public prosecutor, which are reproduced in the book, her mother took the younger children, moved out of their house, started divorce proceedings, and “her life fell apart.”
Sinno was still furious at her mother, and that fury is distilled in an instance of divergent literary interpretation. Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary was published while Sinno’s stepfather was awaiting trial. Sinno’s mother recommended she read it. In the story of Jean-Claude Romand, who committed a quintuple homicide—wife, kids, parents—her mother was appalled to see the likeness of her ex-husband. Romand’s whole life was a fiction: for eighteen years, he led his family and friends to believe he worked as a doctor for the World Health Organization in Geneva. In fact, he had no job, no medical degree, and he spent his days driving around and researching the places he planned to say he visited (money he took from relatives to “invest” helped offset the massive shortfall of his unemployment). To her mother, Sinno writes, what’s so fascinating about Romand is not “the fact that he shot his children in the face but his ability to make people believe his lies.” For Sinno, this is a crushing takeaway: her mother’s “partner had raped her young daughter over a period of several years, and yet she thought of him not as a rapist but as a liar.”
This category mistake may also sound familiar. Gerald Fremlin wrote he would’ve felt “just as dishonorable and disgusted with myself if the infidelity had been with an adult,” and he wasn’t alone in this framing. After Skinner told Munro about the abuse, as she recalled to Rachel Aviv of the New Yorker, the atmosphere was fraught when they spent time together: “There was maybe some anger at me for having an ‘affair’ with her husband, but, more than that, I really just felt that I wasn’t there. I was invisible.” Munro made the case that to blame a mother for her husband’s abuse would be to succumb to the culture of misogyny. In light of what we’ve learned over the past year about Munro, we might see her, along with Kouchner and Pudlowski, as contributing to the canon of bystander literature. After all, Munro received the Nobel Prize in 2013 for her devotion to characters who “choose not to choose,” people for whom there are many things that they cannot or do not “understand there and then, but that only long afterwards stand revealed at best in the form of an epiphany.” As the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, went on to say, her body of work is a testimony to how our “innermost self is essentially inaccessible to other people, often eluding even ourselves until it is too late.”
In a characteristically recursive passage, Sinno states: “‘Her life fell apart.’ It’s easy enough to write. A few words, then onto the next thing. But try and imagine what it actually means.” For fourteen years—to love a man, to make a life, rebuild a ramshackle house together, give birth to two of his children, go back to nursing school while he supports you. One day, it all vanishes—you lose your husband, your home, your neighbors, possibly your daughter, your whole context. The point hit home. As a boy I was sexually abused by two of my grandparents, independent of each other, one on either side of my family. (American gothic much?) Some weeks after I, as an adult, told my mother what had happened to me, I too had an angry-tearful phone call. “This is just so horrible,” my mother said. “I feel like your whole childhood was a lie.” If you think that’s bad, I didn’t say, try having been me! Like Sinno, I was furious.
Sinno’s generosity of spirit suggests that at a certain point, with enough distance, you might see suffering on the horizon, where it starts to look non-hierarchical. Being sexually abused is one thing; failing to prevent your beloved child from being raped and molested is also a thing. Which is worse? Does it matter? 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.
AND YET. For the victim, the betrayal is never merely a lie or a deception, no matter how vast or monstrous; it is a physical assault with metaphysical consequences—the apparatus in Kafka’s penal colony etching a tattoo into the soul’s every dendrite. Betrayal is the greatest sin, Dante held, why Judas, Brutus, and Cassius received the epicentral sentence in the ninth circle: Satan endlessly masticating them, feet first. But Jesus and Caesar were both grown men, the son of God and the emperor of Rome, so not the most defenseless creatures. The sexual betrayal of a child is something quite special. “I remember resenting, disliking it,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her abuse as a six-year-old. “What is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive.”
Sinno’s fearless patience in staying with what flows from these ontological realities is a magnificent corrective to what she rightly bemoans as the “lack of philosophical writing on the subject.” Taking up the second-person, Sinno stages the scenario of sitting on a park bench with a friend, watching children play with their fathers, when, “without breaking off or changing the subject, it occurs to you to wonder if the fathers are going to rape their children when they get back from the park,” or if, on the way home, “they’re going to stop by the side of the road just long enough for a little blow job.” The curse doesn’t end there. Her daughter likes Sinno to rub her back lightly as she goes to sleep: “All it would take is for my hand to change direction and slip down into her panties. I could stroke her little slit if I wanted to. She’d be so surprised she wouldn’t dare say anything. I could put my finger inside her, it’s just a matter of a few centimeters, and our lives would be changed forever.” Child sexual abuse is like being hog-tied and force-fed from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You can never unknow.
The primary response to trauma is dissociation, the evacuation of oneself when too much reality can’t be borne. This splitting is a death, an evanescence, and Sinno writes about how a ghost-self comes to hover and haunt her in its wake. Surprisingly, she doesn’t return to her epigraph in light of all this, Humbert Humbert on that strange feeling of an “oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” It’s a missed opportunity, because we victims are made to feel like our own murderers. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing you of your own guilt. (It’s also surprising that Sinno doesn’t cite Nabokov’s passage in his memoir Speak, Memory about being fondled at the age of eight or nine by his Uncle Ruka at the dining-room table.) The hideous constraint can lead you to place stones in your overcoat pockets and walk into a river. That splitting, the leaving and return, as Sinno’s literary achievement shows, can also lead to a remarkable ability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.
Sinno’s book is remarkable for another, related quality. It’s suffused with ambivalence. Does she contradict herself? Very well then, she contradicts herself. She brings up Eichmann, then retreats: “I know Eichmann has nothing to do with my story.” (Clearly, I’m less certain.) Whenever she sees a new book by a survivor she wants to flip to the gruesome parts, “what he did, how many times, where, what he said,” but she’s horrified that a reader might do the same with hers. So many things both fascinate and repulse her. Much that could be pure or simple is conflicted, tortured. And what Sinno is most ambivalent about is Sad Tiger.
She doesn’t believe literature frees us—the writer isn’t liberated through an alchemy of reflection and truth-telling, the reader isn’t healed by finding in the pages of a book a mirror. The very idea of art, like a black-eyed Susan, growing out of this stricken soil is sickening to Sinno. She lists seven convincing points in the chapter “Reasons for not wanting to write this book” and laments her entire project’s fait accompli: if readers are drawn to her book, they’ll already be on her “side,” so “what’s the point, if we’ve been in agreement about everything since the beginning?” Why did Sinno put herself through this?
One of the lines Sinno visits and revisits is from a historian. Asked why soldiers raped during World War II, he replied, “They rape because they can.” She ultimately settles on the same reason for why she wrote Sad Tiger. Because she can. “And, like for the soldiers,” she says, “the answer shatters into an infinite series of fractals that lead to melancholy, but also to rage and to joy.”
Sinno’s biological father taught her how to read, opening up a refuge for her imagination, but it was her stepfather who made her “understand the duplicity of language and of silence. It is from that intimate understanding, that hate, that I write.” Writing and reading, rage and joy, silence and speech, parents and children. At one point near the end of Sad Tiger, Sinno’s ten-year-old daughter asks her for a bedtime story. We’re treated to a fairy tale about a princess and her seven beloved brothers who are turned into swans by their evil stepmother. They are forced to take flight, leaving the poor princess all alone.
Sinno’s story of transformation and love is for her daughter. There’s a happy ending. In its own way, and down the line, Sad Tiger might be for her as well. Literature is a challenge and a consolation, a place where we make meaning together, in creation and interpretation. We make things real by writing or reading them into existence, at least in our own minds. That too is a way to never unknow.
Elias Altman is a partner at Massie McQuilkin & Altman Literary Agents.