I just finished the most powerful book I’ve read this year and I’m troubled. But not for what you talk about – a little girl raped for years by her stepfather -: for how you talk about it. Neige Sinno she succeeded in a feat that only great writers can do: create literature with evil. I am filled with admiration and respect for this work, but also with fear, because I am aware that by reading Sad tiger (Neri Pozza, pp. 240, €18.00) I have crossed a threshold from which there is no turning back. It’s been since I read as a girl The mean demon by Fyodor Sologub, a Russian novel from 1907, that I didn’t feel I had been so close to evil. I have never forgotten that demon, and I don’t think I ever will Sad tiger.
Neige Sinno is a 47-year-old French writer who now lives in Mexico with her partner and daughter. You have studied American literature, translated, taught at university, published a novel entitled The Trucksan essay in Spanish and many short stories. Sad tiger (published in Italy by Neri Pozza: well done, nice shot) is in the final of the European Strega Prize and deserves to win it (in France it has already won a Goncourt des Lycéens and a Prix Femina) but I don’t know if the author would be happy about it. On every page of Sad tiger you can feel the fatigue and torment not only for what Sinno has undergone, but for having decided to write about it, she being so demanding of herself. As if she feared that writing a personal story could dull the value of the literary work. I would like to be able to reassure her, I will certainly not be the only one to do so, even if I believe (I will meet her at the Turin Book Fair, where I will present her book) that Neige Sinno is an impossible person to reassure.
Those who have known evil, those who have been “in the other place” and have had the courage to tell it, are condemned not to forget.
«The other place, for me, is a neighboring town. A world that is found, as in fantasy literature, right next to ours, almost overlapping ours, a kind of fourth dimension. You end up in it for the first time and after that you never get out, as soon as a shadow appears you return there, despite your will. I happen to meet people who have been or are going to the land of darkness. I recognize them, there is something in their eyes. I think they see that something in me too. It is a silent recognition, which cannot be spoken about. We wouldn’t know what to say. And it wouldn’t be worth it anyway. What would we say to each other if we could say anything to each other?”.
Yes, what would those who have been to hell say to each other, if they could do it? Maybe they could say to each other “You too?” or “We are still alive” or, in the case of those who were able to give such a lucid and perfect story: “Thank you, Neige Sinno, for being able to say the unspeakable.”
