The Naked Eye (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	May 2009
First published:	May 2009
Authors:	Yoko Tawada
Translators:	Susan Bernofsky
Dimensions:	174 x 125 x 14mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade / Unsewn / adhesive bound
Pages:	228
ISBN-13:	978-0-8112-1739-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > General Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > Historical fiction
LSN:	0-8112-1739-6
Barcode:	9780811217392

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