This one is related by the seven year old daughter of a diplomat, growing up in a diplomatic community in Peking in the seventies. It's delightfully solipsistic in the way she assumes herself to be the centre of the world:
Each morning, a slave arrived to do my hair.
She didn't know she was my slave. She thought she was Chinese. In truth, however, she had no nationality, since she was my slave.
Before Peking, I lived in Japan, where the best slaves were found. The quality of slaves in China left much to be desired.
imbued with a correspondingly distinctive perspective:
From the window of my new bedroom, China is hilariously ugly. I give the sky a condescending glance. I bounce up and down on the bed.
and wonderfully evokes the sort of pure imaginative world that one imagines only a child can inhabit:
A horse is that unique place where it is possible to lose all anchorage, all thought, all consciousness, all idea of tomorrow, where one is nothing more than an upward leap and a headlong charge.
A horse is access to the infinite, and riding is that moment of unity with the Mongols, the Tartars, the Saracens, the Sioux, and other mounted comrades who have lived to ride, to be.
Riding is the spirit that leaps from four hooves, and I know that my bicycle has four hooves and that it leaps and that it is a horse.
Describing one of Kate Atkinson's books, a reviewer once referred to the 'sprightly omniscience' with which it leapt from past to present and back again, and something similar is at play in Loving Sabotage - the narrator writes with the barbed innocence of childhood, but there is a subtly mediating 'grown-up' consciousness also at play, and the result (obviously) is glittering writing which just cries out to be quoted and re-cited. Nothomb's also particularly fond of a stylistic device which I tend to overuse myself (when writing elsewhere than here) - the emphatic closing single-sentence paragraph (a small sample, taken all out of context: "The unspeakable infamy of it all"; "From that moment on, I knew that the world of literature was rotten"; "For the second time I blessed Chinese Communism", and so on).
There are two major story-threads. First, the battles between the diplomats' children, in which the 'Allies' wage ongoing war on the East Germans ("[t]he average age of the combatants was approximately ten"), as regulated and absurd as 'adult warfare', replete with rules, customs, cunning strategies, shifts in power and the 'Secret Weapon', a vat filled by urine and Indian ink into which captured East Germans are lowered for purposes of torture. And second, the impossibly self-sufficient, unapproachable Elena, who, all of six years old, "lived her life as if it were perfectly sufficient to be the most beautiful little girl in the world, and to have such long hair", and with whom the narrator becomes absurdly infatuated, going to great lengths to win Elena's love, and finally, after a protracted campaign, committing a monumental act of self-sabotage. (Adults feature in all this only as more or less irrelevant phantom figures in "an advanced state of degeneration", to be vaguely pitied and patronised.) It's all rather acerbic, but it's so wide-eyed and somehow 'pure' that it also completely convinces.
I didn't actually like this book quite as much as the slightly breathless words above might suggest, but I do think that it's very, very good. Would be v. interested to read more of Nothomb's books.
