The Naked Eye

Spectacular trip. The images are dancing off the pages. The emotions are rattled by this awesome author. A must read.

This book turned out to be surprisingly good! I didnt have an idea what I was getting into as I never heard of this author before. I definitley recommend this book to literature lovers, or even to have something to look upon when looking at oneself in another shoes.

In Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye--translated from German earlier this year--a Vietnamese student travels to East Berlin to give a lecture on "Vietnam As a Victim of American Imperialism," only to be smuggled against her will to the other side of the Iron Curtain. She then tries to catch a train to Moscow but instead finds herself in Paris, alone and alienated by language, ideology, and ethnicity. Throughout all of these displacements, the student grows increasingly obsessed with Catherine Deneuve (to whom she refers throughout the novel in the second person), taking refuge in the darkness of half-empty cinemas to watch the actress's films over and over again. Tawada's novel doesn't hesitate to explore complex issues of identity and representation in an image-saturated world, but what has stayed with me the most is how her prose beautifully embodies her young character's fragile and preoccupied state of mind.-From Guernica web magazine