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. 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.