Le sabotage amoureux

the long version

""I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old."". "So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking for three years in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim confines of the gated government housing ghetto of San Li Tun on her "horse" (bicycle). In a tireless battle against boredom, she concocts a fantasy life as rich as her surroundings are bleak. During one of her tours of duty as a pathfinder in a war that has broken out in the ghetto between the children of various nations - a hilarious microcosm of "adult" world politics - she encounters a young Italian girl, Elena: beautiful, aloof, disdainful of silly games. Our heroine is instantly infatuated, and comes to realize the only fight worthy of her energies is shattering Elena's indifference."--BOOK JACKET.