Description

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.

Crossing borders of language, nation, ethnicity, sexuality and art, The Naked Eye is a cinematic, incandescent novel that anticipates and embodies our twenty-first century nightmares and dreams.

Publisher Review

The Naked Eye is a fever-dream page-turner. Yet expertly entwined in the narrative are the everyday perils of an undocumented individual and the loss of one’s identity…. A tale of detachment and escape from the horrors of the modern world * New Statesman * Tawada’s prose is light on its feet, informal while still feeling deliberate, providing delicate and straightforward descriptions of events that are often complicated and bizarre * New York Times * Reading Tawada is an immensely fun and occasionally bewildering experience… A blisteringly imaginative writer * Guardian * Tawada disrupts our perception and reveals the terror and beauty of our world as we get lost in it, and regain our footing through reading her novels — Kit Fan The Naked Eye is full of […] arresting moments * Telegraph * Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives new senses in return — Madeleine Thien