[In the following review, Thon contends that The North China Lover is less distant and more humane than the earlier novel The Lover.]

Spare and erotic, The North China Lover is not merely the story of The Lover retold: it is a haunting transformation of Marguerite Duras's original vision, more tender and more terrifying, more devastating because it is more humane.

In pre-war Indochina, a wealthy Chinese man meets an adolescent girl on a ferry and offers her a ride in his limousine. She's poor and white, a child, but they are bound to each other from the start, "shut in together, in the twilight of the car." The lover is "more solid" than he was in the first book, "less timid facing the child." The balance between them has shifted. Though the child still can be cruel, she's too vulnerable to be callous, too immersed in her own desire to pretend she wants the Chinese only for his money.

Crossing one boundary allows the child to cross all others. She loves everyone too much: the man, her beautiful friend Hélène, her brother Paulo. It's dangerous, living this way. Despair and insight come with passion, the child says, and it's true: fears intertwine; one threat exposes another. Thanh, her mother's chauffeur, is the only one to refuse her. "He says inside him he has the fear of killing the men and women with white skins, that he has to beware."

His words echo. All her life the child has been tormented by her older brother, Pierre, afraid of what he'll do to her and Paulo if he finds them together. She imagines being killed by tigers, or a stranger, or a brother—she asks the lover how he would kill her at Long-Hai, and he says, "Like a Chinese. With cruelty on top of killing." These fantasies have a terrible logic. There is a place where desperation and desire collide, where the fear of being destroyed and the fear of being abandoned are one.

For those who live inside this novel, love is forbidden: the love of a grown man for a child, a mother for a brutal son, a sister for a fragile brother. But Duras's people transcend judgment. The mother tells the Chinese man, "You ought to know, Monsieur, that it is sacred even to love a dog. And we have the right—as sacred as life itself—not to have to justify it to anyone."

Originally written as notes for a filmscript, The North China Lover is elliptical, sometimes eerie: the child "dissolves in the moonlight, then reappears." The "I" of the first novel has stepped out of our way, has become an eye instead, lingering on a hand that seems "charmingly crippled," or on the "fabulous, silken flatness of the delta." Again and again, the eye focuses on the skinny body of the child, so we can never forget how young and small she is.

Duras is re-imagining her own work, giving directions. In a footnote, she tells us Hélène has died of tuberculosis. In another she says the actress who plays the child can't be too pretty. "Beauty doesn't act. It doesn't look. It is looked at."

The effect of these details is surprising. They don't distract us. Our awareness of Duras's process only pulls us closer. We are with a woman trying to reveal the experience at the center of her life, participating in her fierce desire to get it right.

Marguerite Duras knows the lover is dead when she begins the second novel. She's learned that the people of Sadec loved him for his kindness and simplicity, that toward the end of his life he was very religious. He's become human and real to her in ways he wasn't when she told her story the first time. In the introduction, she says: "Writing this book made me deliriously happy. The novel kept me a year, enclosed me in that year of love between the Chinese man and the child."

The final section of The North China Lover is a list of suggested shots for the filmmaker that reads like a poem. The story unfurls one last time, and we see everything quickly, in bursts: "The straight monsoon rain and nothing more, that straight rain across the entire frame. Straight, like no place else." The lovers are absent but seem to move in the white space, between the images, between "a day of a different blue" and the surface, the "skin" of the dark river "very close up." Like Duras, we feel a sense of awe and joy, plunged into the world of the child and her Chinese lover again.