The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada (HC)

A young Vietnamese woman is invited to travel from Ho Chi Minh City to speak at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. On her arrival, 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 on the western side of the Berlin Wall. There she falls under a strange spell of domestic and sexual boredom with her abductor, until one night she manages to escape on a train to Moscow... but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, penniless, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) wanders the fringes of society, meeting a sex worker, another Vietnamese immigrant, a theatre troupe and other shadowy characters. But at the centre of her new life is Catherine Deneuve, the iconic film star whose films she loses herself in and who becomes the object of her obsessions.

REVIEWS

"A distinguished contribution to the unique paranoid style of the new European novel."― Anis Shivani, The Brooklyn Rail

"Her finest stories dramatize the fate of the individual in a mobilized world."― Benjamin Lytal,, The New York Sun

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

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 978-1803511719
Pages: 240