In the cinema, a prequel illuminates an original work by telling the premises a posteriori. Snow Sinno might not like that we qualify as well Realidadhis new work which seems to Pol but the term remains the most suitable for talking about this text published a year and a half after the immense success of Sad tiger. Realidad tells, in fact, the geographic, intellectual, sensory path traveled by Sinno snow for twenty years. A course allowed him to tell, in Sad tigerwith an unprecedented accuracy, the rapes of which she was the victim, child, from her stepfather. A course that risks confusing many of its original readers, which some will find boring, other complexes, but which has the virtue of enlightening the difficulty in speaking of oneself but also the ambition of the writer: to think as much as to tell, to deconstruct as much as to assert.
When Sad tiger Going out at the end of the summer of 2023, Sinno Snipo has still published almost nothing, with the exception of a collection of short stories in a confidential publishing house. She has been a teacher in literature, has lived in Mexico since 2006, her book was refused by several houses. As soon as it was released, it became the phenomenon of the literary school year. The press is enthusiastic about this text which, neither novel, nor autobiographical story, nor essay, breaks with previous works on incest. The prices accumulate, femina and goncourt of high school students in France, Strega Europe in Italy … Sales reach 250,000 copies. A success that Sinno’s snow is delighted, aware that he is a little more than literary: “I had on my shoulders this issue of being a spokesperson without having chosen him, I knew that everything I was going to say was not just about me. If I was wrong, I was going to regret it even more because I was lucky to have a microphone to talk about what happens to the victims,” she sums up, he said.
Antonin Artaud, Marcos sub-commander …
Very in demand, she has little time to write anything other than brief texts, some literary criticisms, the preface to Hospitality to the demon From Constantin Alexandrakis who has just appeared at Verticalales/Gallimard and poems who, she says, “will never be published anywhere, it’s a way for me to take notes”. On the other hand, in 2020, before Sad tigershe wrote in Spanish Realidad. Upon her return to Mexico in 2024, she embarked on her translation in French. She takes it back on the sidelines, here to change a first name, there to better explain how this book made the writing of the next obvious. Decision is made to publish it in the spring of 2025. A few days before the release, Snow Sinno wonders-worried, would dare to be done-of the reception which will be made to this text, which it presents as the “story of its metamorphosis”. The epigraph of the book sets the tone … “And I without asking questions I get on the motorcycle and we leave” (Roberto Bolaño).
Realidad Begins like a travel account, that of two young women, one French, the other Andalusian, students at the University of Michigan, who leave in Mexico in search of a myth, the undercom fee Marcos. They fail, come back, leave, we have fun with their disappointments, their naivety, their ready -made ideas and the reactions they arouse. The text continues with a long detour in the Travel to the land of Tarahumaras D’Antonin Artaud, allows himself to reflect on what otherness is, the words “Indian” and “natives”, very different depending on whether we are from here or there, makes a new detour by a childhood memory, returns to the Zapatanian revolution and ends with the story of two meetings of “women who fight” organized in chiapas.
“I wanted a hybrid text, which is a failed travel story, because it is a literary genre that interests me, but with something quite reflexive, which is close to the essay, without being really one, since it is written in the first person,” she claims.
Zigzags and parentheses
By opting for a disjointed construction, dotted with parentheses, sometimes longer than the main story itself, Sinno snow takes the risk of disarping. Because if it already proceeded in Sad tigerpassing from narrative to testing, the subject is, this time, less familiar to the French reader, which often has only very superficial knowledge of the Zapatanian revolution and/or Antonin Artaud. A difficulty that the author assumes: “I asked myself the question: do I write foot notes? I tried, but that did not correspond to the rhythm of the book. So, I decided to trust the reader, in her ability to understand without everything.” As for zigzags and parentheses, she sees them as a necessity and a game with the reader, a way of losing it, then to catch up with it: “Throughout the text, I remind you where I go, that all these digressions are not free. And the parentheses are adapted, they remind me of the image of the onion skins that we remove one after the other.”
It takes a little patience, exceeding half of the book, or even reaching its last pages, to understand how this text is the path that led Sinno snow to the writing of this intimate story that is Sad tiger. There is the most obvious, this feeling lived during these women’s meetings in Chiapas. “I knew that by getting out of these moments, there was something in me that had been reconciled with reality. That I was going to write things I had seen, to write things I had experienced, that is what gave me a momentum to write on my own experience,” she continues. At this moment, the use of a collective “we” to talk about the violence suffered by each of his companions gives a higher dimension, a different justification for what would be, to the test of “I”, only a simple personal story. Similarly, the intertwining of two narrators, one in adventure and experience, the other in literary commentary and reflection, who, however, only form the same person, prefigures the device at work in Sad tiger : “Autobiography for me is unbearable, there is something a little ashamed to tell your own life. To get there, it must be made necessary for other reasons, that it is really valid at the literary level. I think the book tells this journey.”
In this trip, there is in this “metamorphosis”, other clicks, less visible. So having written Realidad In Spanish has raised the author’s reluctance to speak of herself in the first person. And the idea that, even if literature has not consoled it with violence suffered as children, reading and writing are undoubtedly its space of freedom, experimentation, error in a “violent and hostile world”. At the very end of Realidad“Netcha” becomes aware of it on the bus that brings her back from the last meeting of women, while the task against violence seems immense, almost impossible: “I hear in me bubbling all these sentences that I have not said at the microphone of denunciations, […] I hear the insistent buzzing of this voice that stands out when you have to start a book, this voice that convinces you that there is nothing else to do, that you have to sit at your table and get into work. “
Realidadby Sinno snow, POL, 260 p., € 20.
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