The Naked Eye

Synopsis

"Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency."--Michael Porter, The New York Times 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 and taken to a small town in West Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor--and 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, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) loses herself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin. Dreamy, meditative, and 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 and 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, and so I did not exist." By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer and dance.

Copyright:

2004

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780811223508

Related ISBNs:

9780811217392

Publisher:

New Directions

Date of Addition:

04/14/17

Copyrighted By:

Yoko Tawada

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Literature and Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.