Loving Sabotage
(AMILIE NOTHOMB)
The narrator of Loving Sabotage (Le sabotage
amoureux) is five when she arrives in Beijing in 1972 as the daughter of a Belgian
diplomat. She joins the other children roaming unsupervised in the diplomatic
enclave, engaged in a war which pits everyone else against the East Germans.
She is happy with her status as a pathfinder and her expeditions on her bicycle
? which she has convinced herself is a horse ? until, when she is seven, she
falls madly in love with the six year old Italian girl who moves in next door.
This story is autobiographical; in an afterward Nothomb claims everything in it
is true.
The children''s war is carried out with a nastiness that only children could
envisage: the Allies'' Secret Weapon involves a bathtub filled with their
collected urine. Parental control is limited ? when a truce with the East
Germans is eventually enforced, the children simply declare war on the Nepalese
? and even the Chinese authorities are happily defied.
In that nightmare of a country, the adult foreigners lived
depressed and uneasy lives. What they saw revolted them; what they didn''t see
revolted them even more.
Their children, however, were having the time of their
lives.
Nothomb''s anguished unrequited love offers a counterpoint to
this, with her futile attempts to gain the affections of the precocious femme
fatale Elena. And then there''s her teacher, who tries to make the class write a
collective story...
Loving Sabotage treats the experiences of childhood seriously, but
there''s no pretence that the viewpoint is that of a child. Nothomb explains and
reinterprets her experiences with the benefit of later learning ? In 1974, I
read neither Wittgenstein nor Baudelaire nor even The People''s Daily.
There''s no room for anything profound, but she includes some shrewd
observations: on China under
the Gang of Four, on the way Westerners perceive China, and on the nature of love.
The tone is light-hearted but the sentiment serious, combining the emotional
intensity of the child and the intellectual perspective of the adult, the
innocence of youth and the insights of age. And it''s all done deftly, with
prose that perfectly balances the competing demands on it. Loving Sabotage
is a glorious little novel.
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- I Think About The Love!!!
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- Learning To Teach Children...
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