Neige Sinno rewarded for “Sad Tiger”

2023-11-06 14:12:25

Had Neige Sinno foreseen this moment when, receiving a literary award for sad tiger, the story of the incest she suffered from the age of nine to sixteen, would she have to deal with the surprise, react in a few sentences, rejoice? In her book, crowned yesterday with the Femina prize after having received nine votes out of twelve in the first round, the writer is wary of sentences, refuses easy emotions and anticipates many of the consequences that her text could produce. “My words will be interpreted, distorted, delirious, she writes. They will combine with other ideas. » Further, she also fears “to be invited to radio shows on incest”where we “will ask to summarize in even simpler language than that of the book what is said there”.

Also on the Goncourt list

Already among the best sellers of booksellers, sad tiger now finds itself even more exposed to the general public thanks to the Femina banner on its cover. An effect which will perhaps be amplified by the Goncourt, since it appears on the list of four finalists – but the “ten” would have to do a double twist, with the custom of not crowning an already awarded book and with the rule consisting of rewarding “a work of imagination”.

Throughout the approximately 270 pages of his gripping first-person narrative, Neige Sinno never departs from a requirement for nuance to answer this question: why? Why his father-in-law, a former Alpine hunter with hands “large, of a color that often turns pink-red”hands that “caress but with a sort of roughness, a caress that appropriates itself, that makes its way like his voice which is gentle but overdoes it”, Did he rape her in the cellar of the family home, in the bed he shared with his mother once she left to do her cleaning, in the anteroom of the store where he worked, on vacation? Why she ? Why that ?

Reflection on evil

The dizzying question leads Neige Sinno into a reflection during which she rules out the possible answers one by one. “We are never chosen according to ourselves, but always according to him”, she notes. A reflection on evil, its perception and its consequences, where it summons numerous philosophical, literary and historical references: Gilles Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, the Rwandan genocide…

Son “little memoir”, as Neige Sinno herself defines her book, also allows her to deconstruct certain preconceived ideas in a clinical language, whose crudeness, sometimes, only responds to a concern for truth. The consequences of rape “well beyond the limited domain of sexuality, they affect the ability to breathe, even the ability to speak to others, to eat, to wash, to look at images (…) “, she writes.

But his thinking, if it progresses, does not allow him any victory. “We cannot get up and get rid of something that constitutes us to this extent”, she says. So, ultimately, why his book? Neige Sinno asks herself the question, who does not believe in the therapeutic function of writing and, at the same time, assures it: “Making art with my story disgusts me. » “Because I can” can she just say, inspired by the response of a historian specializing in the two world wars “to the question of why soldiers committed the worst abuses at conflict sites”. “Because they can”he simply said.

Why this book? The Femina jurors, who also rewarded Sentence by the American Louise Erdrich with the foreign novel prize and Anger and Forgetting by Hugo Micheron for the essay prize, perhaps they too questioned themselves when making their choice. It is fortunate that the dryness of the response did not prevent the jury from retaining sad tiger, like the public reading it.