The Naked Eye

(Hardback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

'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 *

Author Bio

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 received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. She is the author of Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Last Children of Tokyo. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.

SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the prizewinning translator of Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Uljana Wolf, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and others. Her biography of Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, appeared in 2021. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she teaches literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts.