A new book by the author of the award-winning bestseller Sad Tiger is a combination semi-autobiographical travelogue and intellectual journey that reconfirms Sinno‘s immense talent as a writer.
“Completely changes all the rules of writing." —Rachel Cusk, on Sad Tiger
“You don’t understand anything,” the narrator is told at the beginning of Neige Sinno’s La Realidad. The narrator, Netcha, and her friend, Magda, try to reach La Realidad, the village in Chiapas, Mexico, where they hope to join an “encuentro,” one of the legendary meetings often involving hundreds or thousands of people involved in the Zapatista movement, and perhaps even to meet the Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos. On a later trip to Mexico, the two friends set up tables in each village square to collect the locals’ stories of their dead and of their dreams, offering their homemade lentils in exchange.
Netcha returns to Chiapas again to attend a Zapatista Escualita, or little school. In search of la realidad, Netcha instead finds ghosts. “I hear the whispers of ghosts wandering like sleepwalkers through my head,” she says, among them Antonin Artaud, who in 1936 made an enigmatic journey to Mexico, and a character in J. M. G. Le Clézio’s The Book of Flights who wanted “to be a traveler without being an oppressor.” Ultimately La Realidad is a story about desire, both intimate and collective, for another possible world.
NEIGE SINNO is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico, and worked as a translator and literature professor. She is the author of two previous books, Le Camion and La Vie des rats. Born in France, she has lived in Mexico for the past 20 years. Her 2023 book, Triste tigre, won several of France’s top literary prizes and became the publishing sensation of the year. It will be published in English as Sad Tiger by Seven Stories, in a translation by Natasha Lehrer.
