The French-speaking Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb is the daughter of a diplomat and during her childhood she lived in many places in the world, except in her own country. Especially her three year stay in China in the early 70s has left a great impression and the period is regularly covered in her books. In Loving Sabotage (Original title: Le Sabotage Amoureux, 1994) she takes the viewer to Beijing of the so-called Gang of Four, a foursome of hardliners that tried to hold the regime on its conservative track after the death of leader Mao. Mao's widow Jiang King was part of the group and she was sentenced to death in 1980-81. The Nothombs arrive in Beijing after a long stay in Japan, and even the 7-year-old Amélie sees the enormous difference between the place where she grew up and was cared for by a loving nanny, and the ugly and smelly country where she is supposed to live and go to school in the following years.
Compared to Japan, living conditions were completely different in China. Foreigners were put in separate residential areas, the Nothombs lived in San Li Tun in Beijing, where contacts with Chinese people were scarce and even forbidden. There was not much to see in the city and when comparing Peking with Tokyo, Amélie saw little reason for tourists to visit the land of the rising sun. The adult Europeans did not look happy, she writes in Loving Sabotage, probably because Beijing was not on the want list of most European diplomats. They and their spouses kept themselves occupied with alcohol and parties in the evening. Young children enjoyed a lot of freedom: in the ghetto there was little danger. Amélie was happy with her bike, which she called horse, a matter of squeezing out a little adventure and romance of the dullness and the ugliness of the surroundings. In the ghetto children played war, with the East Germans as their great enemies, because their parents didn’t want them to put the West German children on the enemy side. The fact that the Cold War was in full swing didn’t penetrate to the youngsters. They wanted fight and torture. What else mattered in a place where nothing much happened?
Amélie talks about the meanness and agony of the "war", but while she is doing her best as a scout and a spy, an Italian family arrives with a beautiful six year old daughter. Amélie falls in love with the angelic Elena from the first moment she sees her. But the girl has little interest in her surroundings and still much less in the jumpy Belgian 7-year-old who tries to catch her attention. Amélie fantasizes about Elena at night and the thoughts give her a warm feeling that she can not identify, but sphinx-like Elena remains cool, aloof and mostly silent. Amélie is paralyzed by the rejection. Her bike/horse is forgotten and she looses all interest for her role as a scout in the war against the communists. She consults her mother who tells her to act aloof and cool herself. To her surprise the move in attitude has a positive result...
Amélie Nothomb, niece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, Belgian Catholic Minister of Home Affairs (1980-86), debuted in 1992 with Hygiène de l'Assassin (English: Hygiene and the Assassin, 2010) and immediately enjoyed great acclaim. Since then a new book appears almost every year - 28 titles so far - and Loving Sabotage is her second one. Typical of her style is the brevity of the narrative structure. Nothomb writes no big family chronicles or historical stories, she seeks her subjects in her own life or in her immediate environment and adopts an ironic tone in which self-deprecation takes an important place. Typical of her books is her love of intertextuality, which lead to the accusation of being snooty, at least partly due to the sometimes fanciful disguises in which she appears at press conferences and in television debates. But you can not escape the impression that Amélie Nothomb amuses herself very well and that she writes almost effortless one bestseller after another. Sometimes she calls herself an heiress of surrealism: she wants to shock and amuse her audience by mixing reality and fantasy and by mocking the conventions. In Loving Sabotage she is in very good form, she fools the reader, puts him at ease soon after while in the meantime she is already preparing the next trap.
Amélie Nothomb is entertaining and funny, magical and overwhelming and in Loving Sabotage she proves in just 130 pages to be a great writer.