Loving Sabotage

'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.

''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 the struggles and pains of adult life.

• | Author: Amelie Nothomb, Andrew Wilson
• | Publisher: Faber & Faber
• | Publication Date: Nov 03, 2005
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9780571226634
• | ISBN-10: 0571226639