“Loving Sabotage” by Amélie Nothomb (Belgium)

Synopsis

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.

Favourite Quote

So we were confined to the ghetto – big deal! Freedom wasn’t calculated in square feet. In the end, freedom was to be left to ourselves. Adults can give their children no finer gift than to forget about them.

Nicola’s Creative Reading Group reading list

Year 5 – “Western Europe” (Oct 2010 – Jun 2011)

“The True Deceiver” by Tove Jansson (Finland/Sweden)
“The Withered Root” by Rhys Davies (U.K.-Wales)
“Loving Sabotage” by Amélie Nothomb (Belgium)
“The Following Story” by Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)
“The Wall Jumper” by Peter Schneider (Germany)
“Women as Lovers” by Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)
“A Heart so White” by Javier Marias (Spain)
“If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller” by Italo Calvino (Italy)
“Zorba the Greek” by Nikos Kazantzakis (Greece)