Tawada, Yoko - The Naked Eye

A suspenseful tale of abduction, obsession and lost identity
that spans Vietnam, East Berlin, West German and
Paris - and fantasies of Catherine Deneuve.
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.