So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's critically acclaimed novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted in Peking for three years in the mid-seventies, our unnamed narrator charges about her tightly enclosed world of the concrete ghetto of San Li Tun on her horse -- her bicycle -- with the dictatorial clarity and loneliness of a warrior-philosopher. From puberty onwards, she announces at one point, life is just an epilogue. On the battlefield of an asphalt playground, in between wars with the children of other...