The Naked Eye

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.