| The Naked Eye Contributor(s): Tawada, Yoko (Author), Bernofsky, Susan (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0811217396 ISBN-13: 9780811217392 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2009 Annotation: An avant-garde poet, Yoko Tawada writes a very experimental novel about a young Vietnamese girl is invited to a youth conference in East Berlin. While there she is kidnapped but manages to escape her abductor and flees to Paris where she is completely alone, broke. There she looses herself in Catherine Deneuve films while her real adventures begin. A feminist, Tawada's work is all about alienation and reinvention. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Alternative History - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2009000610 |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 4.9" W x 6.8" (0.45 lbs) 256 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Bernofsky, Susan: - Susan Bernofsky is the acclaimed translator of Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Columbia University and lives in New York.Tawada, Yoko: - Yoko Tawada--"strange, exquisite" (The New Yorker )--was born in Tokyo in 1960 and moved to Germany when she was twenty-two. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the Tanizaki Prize. |