Product Description

Here in its American debut edition, Loving Sabotage is the remarkable second novel by young Belgian literary phenomenon Amelie Nothomb. "I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was in China, I was seven years old." So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's critically acclaimed novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking for three years in the mid-seventies, our unnamed narrator charges about her tightly enclosed world of the concrete ghetto of San Li Tun on her "horse" -- her bicycle -- with the dictatorial clarity and loneliness of a warrior-philosopher. "From puberty onwards," she announces at one point, "life is just an epilogue." On the battlefield of an asphalt playground, in between "wars" with the children of other nations, she discovers her first love: six-year-old Elena, her coldly indifferent "Helen of Troy." But she soon learns life's hardest rule: if she wants to be loved, she must be cruel in return. A fast, furious -- and often hilarious -- novel of childhood infatuation and intuited truths, Loving Sabotage chronicles one girl's precocious understanding of the struggles and pains of adult life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1597899 in Books
• Published on: 2000
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Readers who have yet to discover the feather-ruffling pleasures of reading popular Belgian author Nothomb (The Stranger Next Door), winner of the Prix du Roman de L'Academie Francaise and other prizes, should jump at the chance with this utterly disarming send-up of a precocious seven-year-old girl's collision with Communist China. Based on the author's experiences as the daughter of diplomats stationed in Peking (Beijing) from 1972 to 1975, the work is a frequently hilarious first-person account of an intrepid heroine who discovers life's ironies through the warped prism 0f CommunismDthat freedom springs from oppression and beauty blossoms where ugliness prevails. The narrator's family is warehoused in the foreigners' ghetto, San Li Tun, where the numerous unsupervised children of various nationalities spend their time fashioning an elaborate and ruthless game of war, designating the East German contingent as the enemy. When exquisite Elena, an unfeeling Italian six-year-old, arrives in the ghetto, the narrator's cheerful savagery is sabotaged by her obsessive love for the imperious beauty. While the narrator goes to ridiculous and heartrending lengths to make her adoration known to Elena, Nothomb interjects her brilliantly simple observations regarding the Communist regime: the running of a school art contest was like a "Rumanian electoral campaign"; the family's Chinese interpreter , Mr. Chang, disappears, only to be replaced by a woman who insists on being called Comrade Chang. With deadpan, ironical bite, Nothomb re-creates a child's insular, supremely egocentric world. While the Chinese setting is evocative, this short novel will benefit from targeting to any reader who is sympathetic to a child's view of the world. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Review of Arts, Lit, Philosophy, and the Humanities, Sandra MacPhearson, October/November 2000
[A]ble to convey the world of the young in spry and delightful ways.

Trenton Times, David Finkle, 3 December 2000
A charming, devious little book.