Description
Book Synopsis''I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old.''
So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb''s critically acclaimed novel about a young girl already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, our unnamed narrator charges about her tightly enclosed world on her ''horse'' (bicycle) with the dictatorial clarity and loneliness of a warrior-philosopher. ''From puberty onwards'', she announces at one point, ''life is just an epilogue''. There, on the asphalt-playground-battlefield, she discovers her first love: six-year-old Elena, her very own coldly indifferent ''Helen of Troy''. But she also learns life''s hardest rule: that if she wants to be loved, she must be cruel in return. Poignant, provocative - and often hilarious - Loving Sabotage chronicles one girl''s precocious understanding of
Trade Review
"Amelie Nothomb is such an utter astonishment, the shock of reading her for the first time is like realising you have missed a whole movement, or a century, in the scheme of things.' Scotland on Sunday
