There Is No Real Lolita

On Neige Sinno's 'Sad Tiger'

Camille Pissarro, Snow Effect at Eragny, 1894, Oil on canvas

In 1977, dozens of prominent French writers and intellectuals — including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, and Gabriel Matzneff — signed an open letter protesting the prolonged pre-trial detention of three men accused of sexually assaulting a group of underage girls.

The letter noted that the girls in question “were not victims of the slightest violence, but, on the contrary, clarified to the investigating judges that they consented (despite the fact that French law denies them the right to consent).” It went on to question why the justice system “recognized the capacity of discernment in a minor of 13 or 14 years when being judged and condemned, only to be denied this capacity when it comes to sex and their intimate life.”

The letter ended, rather mordantly: “Three years for caresses and kisses, that’s enough.”

In Neige Sinno’s prizewinning novel Sad Tiger, which recounts in thorough and relentless detail the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, the French author argues that what everyone wants to know is what goes through the head of a pedophile.

“With the victims,” Sinno writes, “it’s easy, we can all put ourselves in their shoes. Even if you've not experienced it, the bewilderment, the silence of the victim is something we can all imagine, or think we can. The perpetrator, on the other hand, that's something else.”

Yet when I read this open letter, it was instead the actions of these young girls that I initially found incomprehensible, and therefore fascinating. Was their testimony coerced? Volunteered? And if it was given freely and sincerely, were they indeed capable, as the writers argued, of consent?

Behind these questions is the dark laughter of Humbert Humbert himself, and the myth of the tender and innocent nymphet, faithful to her errant yet well-meaning protector, willing initiatee into the pedophile’s esoteric cult of forbidden love. The open letter, possessed of its own fancy prose style, had worked its Nabokovian trick.

---

When Sad Tiger was published in the fall of 2023, it went off like a bomb here in France, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and vaulting an obscure middle-aged writer, who had spent most of her adult life in Mexico, to literary superstardom. The novel won over a dozen significant literary prizes and landed the author on the cover of Télérama. (Imagine Ben Lerner on the cover of Variety, and you’re halfway there.) The long period of exile, the late-in-life fame, the book that everyone was talking about on the subject no one wants to talk about . . . it all began to feel, let us say, a bit familiar. Yet while all novels of child abuse live in the shadow of Lolita, it was Sinno who was reliving the highlight of Nabokov’s career. But why her, and why this book? As Sinno points out, it is not because the subject lacks for treatment:

Many books are published each year by survivors. Mostly fiction. Whenever I come across one, I always like to flip through it. Some are very well written, some not. Either way I read them with the same eye. I am looking for a precise description of the facts. I want to know exactly what he did, how many times, where, what he said, and so on. I loathe the idea that someone might open this book and try to find exactly what was done to me, where he put his cock, and then close it again have found out nothing more than this bizarre fact.

Nor does she believe that writing from the “I” of the victim is necessarily the correct approach:

The best way to consider these narratives is not head-on but obliquely. If the person talking was affected but they were not the primary victim, their account offers a way of discussing incest as a social phenomenon while avoiding the unbearable pathos of direct suffering.

She is also skeptical of the idea that there is an extraliterary dimension to her work. “I don’t believe in writing as therapy,” she writes, “and even if I did, the idea of healing myself with this book appalls me.”

Though Sad Tiger is a marketed as a novel, Sinno takes great pains to ensure that the reader believes every word, even going so far as to include local newspaper articles about her birth, her love of spelunking, and the arrest of her stepfather after she filed a criminal complaint against him as a young adult. She rarely uses proper names and does not employ pseudonyms: Her mother and stepfather, the two people at the heart of her abuse, are simply mère and beau-père, more often elle and il. Her style is spare and direct, if often sarcastic — she is a master of what the French call le second degré — and she almost never uses dialogue. Most strikingly, she does not attempt to build a coherent or stable character of her abuser; she makes no attempt to ‘humanize’ the monster. Her narrative approach is not a straight line, but rather a continual attack, from various angles, against the hard kernel of truth at the center of her story. If Sinno has become a counter-Nabokov, it is perhaps in part because she has built a counter-Lolita, which forsakes the style and embellishment of its predecessor. But can a novel that willingly puts aside all the tools of a novel be a great work of art? To put it another way: Has autofiction finally gotten the best of Lolita?

---

Here are the plain facts: In 1983, when Sinno’s stepfather is 24, and Sinno’s mother 28, the two meet at a training for mountain guides. She already has two young children — Rose, four years old, and Neige, six — who are living with their father, Sammy. In contrast with Sammy (“dreamy, odd, a little withdrawn”) he is decisive, forceful, and gregarious. In the mountains, he is in his element, helping skiers in distress, driving an ambulance, working as a volunteer firefighter, carrying 80 kg sacks on long treks with his comrades. Inevitably, of course, he also has an anger problem, which is introduced in the usual way, at an angle.

How many times I saw him slam his racket on the ground. A racket is expensive, and we didn't really have the money to spend on something like that. But he couldn't help himself. [Mais il est plus fort que lui.]

While I generally found Natasha Lehrer’s translation fluid and precise, here I think a more literal translation would have been better. Rather than the idiomatic “he couldn't help himself,” the final sentence would be better rendered as: “But it is stronger than him.” After all, we are far enough along in the history of the literature of incest where the subject has no need of an antecedent. The it is his vital force, which pushes past the boundaries of right and wrong, responding only to its own atavistic needs. It can save a life just as easily as it can destroy one. Not long after Neige, Rose, and their mother move in with her new boyfriend, he begins to sexually abuse young Neige. As in Lolita, it starts with touching:

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in darkness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn't stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment, I didn't understand what was happening, but from the first moment I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, a horse that needs to be held to stop it getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he too was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Though Sinno describes her stepfather in great detail, she is less concerned with this precise incarnation of her bourreau, or “executioner,” than in making a fractured portrait of the evil that lies within. In this way, she universalizes the experience, doing so through the abstract rather than the particular. She also pushes outside the bounds of her own story to gather the testimony of many different artists who have asked the same essential question, which William Blake formulated so elegantly:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

It is for this reason, I think, that the literature of incest so often touches on the literature of the Holocaust. The investigation leads down the same dark path. Is evil an extra-human force, which takes possession of us? Is there a heart of darkness, or when we arrive there will we only find a lack, an absence? In the testimony of those who have committed incest, Sinno notes the passive construction they often use when discussing their crimes: It happened to me. (The French — ça m’a arrivé — feels even a bit more indirect.)

In any case, it does not bear looking at for too long. How many critics of Lolita have noted that Nabokov’s father was murdered by fascists and his brother Sergey in the camps? As Martin Amis observed in a fine critique on the theme of “nympholepsy” as it multiplied in Nabokov’s work, and eventually ate it alive, there is in Nabokov’s work another unimaginable center of evil, which exists only as an absence, a lack. In his novels, he made no more than a passing mention of the slaughter he and his wife, Véra, narrowly escaped before fleeing to the U.S., the same conflagration that consumed his father and brother. The question is why Nabokov chose to confront the problem of evil by means of the literature of incest, rather than take the more direct route followed by so many of his contemporaries. The answer, I believe, is technical, and one with which Sinno would likely sympathize — in Lolita, he was able to approach it from an angle, rather than head-on. It was his way of looking into the abyss without being consumed by it.

---

In the 1970s and 1980s, many prominent French writers, philosophers, and academics began to construct a vision of progressive sexuality that would break down longstanding taboos surrounding issues like contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. Pedophilia, some felt, was the final frontier. There were those, like Michel Foucault, who thought that children should be able to decide for themselves what was abuse and what was not; there were the apologists, like the signatories of the open letter, who thought that French law should not dictate the age of consent; but there were also avowed pedophiles who made sparkling literary careers out of their sexual predilection for young boys and girls. The most notorious is Gabriel Matzneff, whose Google About page notes, mildly, that “he was the winner of the Mottard and Amic awards from the Académie française in 1987 and 2009 respectively, the Prix Renaudot essay in 2013 and the Prix Cazes in 2015.”

In Matzneff’s novel Under Sixteen Years Old, published in 1974, he argues that young boys and girls form a race apart:

What captivates me is less a certain gender than extreme youth, that which unfolds from the tenth to the sixteenth year and which seems to me to be—even more than we ordinarily appreciate in this formulation—a veritable third sex. 16 years is not always a hard cap for women, who often remain desirable above that age....On the other hand, I cannot imagine an erotic relationship with a boy who had crossed the threshold of his seventeenth birthday....Call me bisexual, or, as the Ancients called it, ambidextrous, I don’t see anything wrong with it. In my eyes extreme youth forms its own sex, unique.

The case of Matzneff is indeed grimly fascinating, an unabashed Humbert Humbert who has read his Beauvoir and makes his pronouncements not from prison but on primetime. In 1990, he was invited onto the legendary French literary television show Apostrophes, where he explained that his preference for young girls was not just a choice but a necessity:

I’ve never had any success with women who are 25, 30, or older, women who have established themselves in life...A woman who has already had many men in her life, many disillusions — because in general men are either egoists, or cowards — these women cannot help but become hardened. And that’s why I prefer people who are not yet hardened, who are more kind.

Notice how his argument shapeshifts. In this telling, Matzneff is more than just a connoisseur of this strange, magical race — he is also a protector, even a liberator, of his beloved third sex from the clutches of the cowardly race of men. He is a man apart. The broadcast has the vibrant unreality of a nightmare; the horror is so pronounced that the host, the audience, and even the writer himself cannot help but laugh, a titter that sets the nerves on edge. The host, Bernard Pivot, then reads an extract from Matzneff’s latest novel, Mes amours décomposés, written in a poor pastiche of Humbertish:

Dazzling shapes, to which my loves are witness. The conquest in three consecutive days of three unknown [girls], including two virgins, Marie-Agnès and one Brigitte S., with whom I made love every which way, almost without interruption.

It takes someone who is not trapped within the French literary hivemind to break the spell, and turn the prince back into an ogre. Dénise Bombardier, a Quebecois writer sitting in the chair next to Matzneff, slices right through his sophistry:

Right now, I feel like I’m living on another planet...because literature has a kind of aura here, it serves as an alibi for these kinds of admissions...Monsieur Matzneff tells us that he sodomizes young girls of 14 years, of 15 years, that these girls are crazy about him, we know very well that young girls can be crazy about a man who has a certain literary aura, and we also know that old men attract young girls with sweets. Monsieur Matzneff attracts them with his reputation.

Yet Gallimard, the storied French publishing house, continued to publish his works until 2019, when the French journalist Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, a nonfiction account of her sexual relationship with Matzneff, which began when she was 14 and he was 50. Looking back now, it is hard not to see Matzneff as a natural outgrowth of Lolita as a literary phenomenon, the pale imitator who brought Nabokov's fiction to life. Yet even after the publication of Le Consentement, Matzneff found his defenders, even amongst women. Josyane Savigneau, for example, then the books editor at Le Monde, called the accusations a “witch hunt.” Sinno, too, observes this strange gendered paradox in her own story. After her stepfather, following a confession, is tried and convicted for rape, he finds many female admirers while in prison, including — this is not a joke — a woman who founded a group to support survivors of sexual abuse. Sinno’s sarcasm practically drips from the page:

During the trial she explained that he was open to dialogue, that it was rare to see a man like him with such qualities in the dock; basically, that she would have been happy to have an abuser like him.

If Lolita has often cast a kind of hypnotic spell over intellectuals who should know better, the rape, especially of a child, seems to confer a strange sort of power on the rapist. Like the serial killer, the child rapist is a spectacle, a mythic creature — half-man, half-beast. Given this history, it is not hard to understand why Sinno has written a novel that explains, with wrenching fidelity to the facts, how child rapists take advantage of this reality distortion field to obscure their crimes and even cast themselves as victims. Yet what is left out of Sad Tiger is the possibility of a third way — a work of great art and style written by someone who was abused, which uses the magic of literature to transform the beast back into a man. While Sad Tiger is a very good book, there is a contradiction at its core, which animates it as a work of what Sinno calls témoignage, or “testimony,” and limits it as a work of fiction. As Sinno admits (my translation):

I would love to get this distance, for obvious reasons, but it is not possible in the position on the chess board where I was placed.

But what is not possible for her is still possible for others. Often, writers who were abused choose to play both sides of the board, writing from the perspective of both the victim and the rapist. Edward St. Aubyn’s Never Mind is a particularly magnificent example, gliding in a fluid and wickedly funny third-person omniscient into the morally decrepit rationalizations of the father, David, who begins to rape his son, Patrick, when he is just five years old. What makes Never Mind truly distinctive, however, is how confidently St. Aubyn expands his fictional world beyond the charged binary of victim and abuser, absorbing the lives of the friends of Patrick’s father and his alcoholic mother. St. Aubyn is equally at ease with the fatuous ponderings of a well-known philosopher, and the pseudo-profound criticisms of his freelancer girlfriend, as he is with the despair, rage, and self-loathing that animate David. St. Aubyn not only plays both sides; he can be any piece on the board.

Even when expanded, however, Sinno’s chess metaphor still leaves something to be desired, because it implies that the “I” itself must always remain a pawn. The title of Sinno’s novel is, in part, an homage to a 2011 memoir called Tiger, Tiger, by the late American writer Margaux Fragoso. Written from the first person, Tiger, Tiger is the story of Fragoso’s relationship — often sexually abusive, but not always — with her neighbor, Peter, which began when Fragoso was eight and ended when Peter committed suicide 14 years later, at the age of 66. Peter’s vibrant and often delusional stream of observations and complaints reminded me of the work of the great portraitists in the American canon — Roth, Morrison, Bellow — but that’s the key. Peter is a character. Fragoso’s portrait of him is astonishing, skin-crawling, and often hilarious, but you would not mistake it for a man. Her dialogue, in particular, is exceptional. Here is Peter using his own trauma to justify his sexualization of young girls:

They tell you it’s dirty; then they make you undress in front of them. When I was in a boys' school in upstate New York, the nuns used to whip us in the showers. In the showers, they would line us up and beat us! Yeah, like they didn't get some kind of thrill out of looking at our naked bodies. You know why those nuns were so cruel? Sexual repression. Sexual repression and rage. This is what comes from all the repression in society. Do you know what I believe? I’ve even read literature on this. I believe that if children were to grow up with sexuality, as though it was normal and natural, which it is . . . If they were allowed to get joy and pleasure out of their God-given parts, this world would be a much better place.

Fragoso herself was not a purist about this form of writing. “All writers still have the choice whether to publish their autobiography as memoir or fiction,” she said, in an interview with The Tottenville Review. “It’s a personal decision. If you publish a book as a memoir, it gives people with similar experiences the chance to relate on a deeper level.”

While Sinno is always suspicious of her own motivations, Fragoso seems comparatively untroubled by the idea that the writer might have something to gain, beyond the opportunity to fashion something aesthetically pleasing:

Some readers wonder if Tiger, Tiger must have been terribly painful for me to write; actually working on it was a joy. Living something and writing something aren’t the same thing. There’s immense pleasure found in just telling the truth and making art out of something, anything, even negative life events.

What is fascinating about Fragoso’s stance is that, unlike Sad Tiger, large swaths of Tiger, Tiger are clearly invented — not in the overall shape of its story, but in its impossibly vivid rendering of the experience of young Margaux as she ages and begins, year by year, to better appreciate the extraordinary dysfunction of the adults in her life. Using all the tools of the novelist’s art, Fragoso creates an entire world for us to step into, which pulses with the vital force of life itself. In a blurb on the back jacket, Alice Sebold puts it simply, but well: “As the story of a victim, it is gripping; as a work of literature, it’s a triumph.”

---

In France, the success of Sad Tiger was not a lonely one — it was one of many recent books by women who had been sexually abused as children, including Le Consentement (2020), La familia grande (2021), by Camille Kouchner, and Impunité (2023), by Hélène Devnyck. Together with public testimony by other victims, these books have made a tangible impact on both French society and jurisprudence. In 2018, when the French senator Annick Billon broached the possibility of an age threshold for non-consent in sexual relations, her proposal was shot down by members of her own party. In an interview with Le Nouvel Obs, Billon observed that, following the publication of La Familia Grande, “it became difficult for my colleagues to oppose a law that sought to better protect minors.”

Last summer, the newspaper Libération published an extensive investigation revealing a pedophilia ring led by Gabriel Matzneff in the 1970s and 80s. Les hommes de la rue du Bac, a collection of highly cultured and successful writers, lawyers, and journalists, sexually abused girls and boys as young as 4 years old in an apartment in the 7th Arrondissement. Far from caresses and kisses, the victims described repeated, brutal rape, both by sexual penetration and by objects. As of this writing, Matzneff is under criminal investigation for rape of a minor, but he remains at large, and the statute of limitations for many of his crimes has passed. At 88 years old, he remains unrepentant, decrying himself as the victim of the machinations of an army of capricious, grownup Lolitas. After the publication of Le Consentement, he complained publicly that Springora had “drawn a denigrating portrait, blackened, destined to erase me, to destroy me, and, by using a ponderous psychoanalytic vocabulary, tried to make me out to be a pervert, a manipulator, a predator, a swine.”

Just as Lolita was once championed by readers and critics as representing a victory for free expression, so these works have been fashioned into symbols of the power of testimony to redeem a society living silently in sin. That both narratives largely ignore the contents of the books themselves may be regretted, but rarely is it unforeseen. I think this may be why some writers who write about their own abuse choose to fictionalize the experience — if the truth will be distorted anyway, isn’t it better to do the distorting oneself?

And then there’s the problem of pleasure. The hard truth is that the joy that Fragoso describes applies just as much to literature written from the perspective of the abuser as from the perspective of the abused. I have no doubt that Nabokov experienced it, and I’m sure Matzneff did, too. But while literature itself may not be bound by morality, writers are — it is Matzneff's inability to see the poverty of his rigid system of cowardly men, used-up women, and love-crazed Lolitas, with an always heroic and debonair Matzneff at the center, that makes him such a poor and imitative writer. He confuses the aura of Lolita with the text. The power of both Tiger, Tiger and Sad Tiger is, on the other hand, generated by a deep and sympathetic reading, not just of Lolita but of the rhetoric and grammar of abuse that it contains, the infinite and often contradictory rationales that evil uses to justify its destruction of the innocent. In a scene in Tiger, Tiger of almost unbearable irony, it turns out that Peter dislikes Lolita because it is clear to him that Lo doesn’t love Humbert. Peter believes his love for Margaux to be pure, the exception to the rule. His blindness is irrational, biblical, and absurd, but it is also human.

The damage that this compulsion inscribes on the victim, however, shatters any possibility that she will go on to live a normal life — though society may be redeemed by this ritual of collective witnessing, the mark of the abuse lives with the abused forever. It is a brand that seeps beneath the skin, poisoning everything it touches. There is, of course, the emotional fallout, the jitters, the nightmares, the inability to trust. In Sad Tiger, Sinno describes her perpetual suspicion, shading into paranoia, that she experiences following the birth of her daughter:

I’m always spying even now, sometimes absentmindedly, sometimes with intent. I spy on the fathers in the changing room at the pool, the teachers who see students in their office. I spy on people I meet in the street, my friends, my neighbors. I spy on my partner. He knows that I love him, that I trust him. I think he knows that I spy on him, and that I can’t not.

Yet the worst is that abuse awakens this monstrous possibility in the abused. In the most disturbing and compelling passage in the novel, Sinno describes the horror that always lurks in the mind of the victim, even during the most innocent rituals of childhood:

My hand moves over her smooth back. She is still tanned from the summer. She is skinny, like I was. I can feel her vertebrae sticking out like hard little hummocks beneath her skin. I move slowly up and down her back the way she likes it. I'm alone with her in the bedroom and I begin to envision what I could do to her. 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.

At one point, Sinno writes that while she believes suicide to be the only honorable course for child rapists, it is the victims who are more likely to go through with it. Here, we can see that this is, in part, because the victim knows better than anyone how thin the screen is between these two roles, how easily anyone can pass from compulsion to the act. “If we had the choice,” Sinno writes, “who wouldn’t choose to be the tiger rather than the lamb, the wolf rather than the dog?”

Earlier this year, Sinno wrote the preface for L’hospitalité au démon, a novel by Constantin Alexandrakis, in which the writer, who was sexually abused as a child, begins to fear that he, too, could be tempted to become a pedophile in his turn. The demon is no longer the abuser without, but the abuser within.

While Sad Tiger remains very faithful to contemporary research on child abuse, Sinno does venture one unverifiable hypothesis about the physical legacy of abuse, which I nevertheless found to be very convincing. In 2013, when Sinno was 35 years old, an enormous, cancerous cyst was found on her ovaries, which required immediate surgery. While recovering in Marseilles, she found out that an old friend she had lost touch with was being treated for lung cancer in a nearby hospital. A mutual friend observes that, of all the people in their group, it was these two “who’d had the most fucked-up childhoods.” If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of Margaux Fragoso, it’s because she died of ovarian cancer in 2017, at the age of 38, leaving behind a husband, a young daughter, and one extraordinary book. After reading Tiger, Tiger, I couldn’t help thinking that she would have been the best of us.

Kyle Berlin is a journalist, novelist, and editor based in Paris. He writes on Substack at Paris, City of Lit.