SOURCE: A review of The North China Lover, in Boston Review, January/February, 1993.

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...