In the hands of a French male director, Marguerite Duras's The North China Lover could become a voyeuristic film of another Lolita. In fact, it has. Sex in all its variations certainly pervades the novel, sometimes gratuitously. But, unlike many of Duras's previous novels with the same plot and characters, the girl in this novel is not defined only in sexual terms. Duras has other more central themes: memory and fiction itself.

Written first as a film script, this autobiographical work takes place in 1930 Indochina. A poor, half-caste 14-year-old girl has an affair with a wealthy, 27-year-old Chinese man. Her brothers, Pierre and Paulo, know of the affair, while her mother, "killed by life," views her daughter's sexuality almost indifferently. The Chinese lover, who feels the "despair at the happiness of flesh," redeems the family debt, thinking the girl will leave for France.

Happily, Duras subverts convention by demanding in a wry footnote that the film actress not be pretty: "Beauty doesn't act. It doesn't look. It is looked at." And here lies the crux of the novel. Much is made of the girl's "looking," of her need to observe the cold truth of every detail. "She gives him a straight look. A look you could call unabashed. Fresh. Not right, her mother calls it." At 14, poverty and incest have made her neutral, vigilant, unsentimental. She survives by desiring a man "who loves a woman and the woman doesn't love him." Observing her passion much as a writer might, she strips it of prettiness. She does what she does, "just to see." And it is her gaze, not the lover's, that names and defines her experiences.

The girl, as Duras remembers herself, is already writing her own life. The novel, which Duras calls both a book and a film, contains wide spaces between short paragraphs, directions for a camera, and even chapters devoted to single line images—very much in the tradition of the nouveau roman. In fact, the girl's eye clicks like a lens. "The canvas shade against the heat. The blood on the sheets. And the city, always invisible, always external—those things she remembered." Her eye is nonjudgmental, mirroring obsession through simple repetition: "She sees him. She lowers her eyes. She looks at him, too. She sees him. She pulls back." Sometimes tedious, the repetition mostly proves hypnotic, drawing the reader from passion to ennui to the "frightful pain of (the lovers') need…." It is an elemental fable where the main characters are nameless: The Girl or The Child, The Man or The Chinese, The Mother.

Yet why recount this same story in novel after novel? Each retelling brings Duras closer to the truth of a memory that haunts her. We remember so we do not forget. Quite simple. But if I record precisely what I remember, the memory becomes fixed; it is not tied to a memory that will die when I die. For Duras, fiction is memory made (dare I say it?) immortal. She remembers her passion but she also remembers the girl who became a writer at that moment. The girl cries at the end, "talk about everything, the happiness as well as the suffering…. In order for people—anyone who wanted to, she says—to tell it over and over again, for them not to forget the whole of the story, for something very precise to remain."

And what remains? The telling remains. Duras writing year after year, recapturing what has compelled her to write. The significance of the affair (ignore the patriarchal French film!) lies not in sexual passion, but in what it produced: Duras as writer. Her fictional self has transformed the real self whose story "demanded to be written—until she reached that moment of clear memory in the forest of writing."