SOURCE: "The Telling Remains," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring, 1993, p. 9.

In the following review of The North China Lover, Romaine discusses how repeating essentially the same story over again in her work allows Duras to perfect the telling of this tale.

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...