The Naked Eye

"A young Vietnamese woman is invited to speak at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. On her arrival, she is kidnapped to a small town on the other side of the Berlin Wall. There she falls under a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor until one night she manages to escape on a train to Russia, but unexpectedly ends up in Paris. Alone, penniless, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) wanders on the fringes of society, meeting a prostitute, another Vietnamese immigrant, a theater troupe, and other shadowy figures. But at the center of her new life is Catherine Deneuve, the iconic film star who becomes the object of Anh's obsessions and fantasies. Crossing borders of language, country, ethnicity, sexuality, and art, The Naked Eye is a cinematic, incandescent novel that anticipates and embodies our twenty-first century nightmares and dreams."-- Uitgever.