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.

Review

'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

'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

'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives new senses in return' -- Madeleine Thien

'Reading Tawada is an immensely fun and occasionally bewildering experience... A blisteringly imaginative writer' ― Guardian

About the Author

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books-stories, novels, poems, plays, essays-in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Kleist-Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, and her novel of Catherine Deneuve obsession, The Naked Eye.

SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the prizewinning translator of works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse. She is the author, most recently, of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser.