The Naked Eye

Tawada’s chilling evocations of disorientation are the peers of Paul Bowles’ most chilling stories. — Booklist

Yoko Tawada’s first novel in English: a suspenseful tale of abduction, obsession, & lost identity that spans Vietnam, East Berlin, West Germany, Paris – & fantasies of Catherine Deneuve.

A precocious Vietnamese high school student — known as the pupil with “the iron blouse”—in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism,” she is abruptly kidnapped & taken to a small town in West Germany.

After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor—& though “the Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China” — she escapes on a train to Moscow . . . but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, broke, & in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) loses herself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin.

Dreamy, meditative, & filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful—each of the thirteen chapters titled after & framed by one of Deneuve’s films. 

“As far as I was concerned,” the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, “the only woman in the world was you, & so I did not exist.” By the time 1989 comes along & the Iron Curtain falls, story & viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer & dance.