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.
