The Naked Eye - Yoko Tawada

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.

Binding: Hardback
Pages: 240