'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). 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.
| ISBN | 0571226639 | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | | ISBN13 | 9780571226634
(What's this?) | | Pages | 144 | | Publisher | Faber and Faber | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Faber and Faber | | Height (mm) | 198 | | Format | Paperback | | Width (mm) | 129 | | Publication date | 03 Nov 2005 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY | 843.914 | |
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"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
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