Neige Sinno

La Realidad

272pp. POL. 20 [euro].

Neige Sinno is emerging as a significant voice in contemporary French literature. Triste Tigre (2023; Sad Tiger, 2025; TLS, January 26, 2024), her breakout book, tells the story of her childhood sexual abuse. Her next book, La Realidad, is an account of time spent with the left-wing Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. It was written before Triste Tigre and serves both as a prequel to the prizewinning bestseller and as a further illustration of Sinno's distinctive technique.

Sinno wrote her first draft of La Realidad in Spanish, before translating it into French. One consequence of this movement between languages is that it allows for the emergence of a narrative persona who is, and is not, Sinno herself. This is the tactic that first allowed the author to tell the story of her own abuse: "The I who speaks here is an I who would not exist if it hadn't first been conceived in a foreign...