Starting in 1992 and up to 2024, Nothomb has published a book every autumn, and I’m using here the term “book” deliberately loose. Depending on your definition, her books could be a novel, a novella or a longer short story. In Loving Sabotage, the seven-year-old unnamed narrator tells her story with innocence, flair, and a complete lack of modesty. “I had everything. I was an epic unto myself. I felt kinship only with the Great Wall, the single human construction visible from the moon. At least it respected my scale” When the story begins, the girl had moved with her parents to the San Li Tun ghetto in Beijing at age five and had been there for three years. The ghetto was reserved exclusively for foreigners, and friendship was far from what the children of the expats wanted from each other. The “terrible, epic war of the ghetto of San Li Tun” begins around the time the girl arrives in China and rages on for years. The story does not offer an idealized or sanitized depiction of childhood. The foreign children in the ghetto, including our narrator, are cruel, intelligent, and unforgiving. Imprisonment, judgment, sabotage, and torture are as much a part of the narrator’s supreme childhood as they are of the global war that, in the San Li Tun ghetto, never truly ends.
First published in English by New Directions, 2000
A Personal Anthology 