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.
