The Naked Eye

by Yōko Tawada, Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Novels, Asian Literature, Literature, Queer

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Yōko Tawada (多和田葉子 Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German.

Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.

Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.

Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her Translator’s Note that prefaces the novel, Susan Bernofsky explains that the author’s creation of this hypnotic work occurred in two languages: Tawada wrote the text in both German and Japanese – changing between languages as the story unfolded to her. The result was an arrival “…simultaneously at two complete manuscripts.” Bernofsky’s translation into English of the version I read was based solely on the German version of Tawada’s novel. And it is a perfect approach to a novel writ on the dialectic indeterminacy of putting thought to words to paper and a mirroring of the story of a young Vietnamese woman losing her grip on place, time and identity.

Tawada wants her Reader to grapple with the possible interpretations of the story’s elements, much as we witness our narrator wrestle with everything from political systems, language, media, place and sexuality. The writing is simply brilliant; the scenes move without seams in a cascading dream-like state. As the Reader we often find ourselves as lost as our narrator. What country are we in? What language is being spoken to us, what is our native tongue? Who am I?

We are given an anchor within the story that is the narrator’s life compass. It is such a brilliantly conceived plot device (and is the impetus for a fabulous switch from first to second person) that if it was done before in literature I would be shocked if it was enacted with such perfection. The protagonist’s love of cinema, and one particular actress, provides the mooring to this tale. Spoilers here are unnecessary.

This is a book of perpetual motion; an homage to personal silence and sound that drowns the larger world of political upheaval, changing national boundaries, untranslatable language. The manuscript(s) themselves offer a tremendous opportunity – I wonder if the Japanese version of this book were to be translated how it would overlay with the German translation. The distortions would be minor perfections that mirror the realities of our own lives: personal stories enacted to those that witness, retold to others through their language via the fourth dimension of time.

Vision is a gap, a crevice – it isn’t that you have a view through this gap, rather, vision itself is the gap, and at the point where it is you can’t see anything at all.

[Kai Spellmeier]

do you know those weird wannabe art films where the characters just don't make any sense and you leave the cinema muttering whatthefuckwhatthefuck under your breath?

Well, this describes my experience reading The Naked Eye quite well. Not a single character in this book made any sense to me, least of all the main character. Maybe it was because everything that happened in this book is so far removed from my own reality that I simply cannot comprehend it. But that's not it. A good book will sweep you up and make you feel and live things that you've never experienced yourself. Unlike the character, I wasn't sent to former East Germany to then be drugged and taken to West Germany where I was supposed to play housewife. Unlike her, I did not flee to Paris and spent my time rewatching the same 13 Catherine Deneuve films. But if I had been, I would have done everything I could to contact my family, to contact the authorities, to tell anyone who listened that I had been kidnapped and wanted to return to my home country. If I had been, I would definitely not have gone back with my kidnapper as soon as he had found me wandering the streets in Paris. The main character acted so irrationally that I simply couldn't connect with her. I wanted her to be able to find her way back home, I wanted her to get out of the hopelessness that her life had been turned into. But everything about this book was so very weird that it felt completely surreal.
I can't say I regret reading this. It sure was an interesting book. But it definitely wasn't my cup of tea.

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[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first Yoko Tawada book. I liked it, it was very surreal and reminded me of Andre Breton and how pictures and movies are super important to the plot. In being this, it did feel a little lost at times but I suppose that’s the point of surrealism - to feel like you are getting lost in a dream. The narrator certainly gets lost herself in different European cities and finds herself completely out of place, and it feels like this for the reader too. You feel very isolated because of the detached narration, and I would have liked it to be a little more emotional but that’s my personal preference. The coldness really reflects how the narrator feels until she is able to focus on vivid pictures of a screen. A really interesting book and I’d like to see if Tawada’s other works are similar.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating doesn't capture my experience of reading this. There are brilliant sections on language and foreignness, along with compelling fictional essays on the films on Catherine Deneuve. But the frustrating picaresque plot often feels more contrived than surreal and makes the main character seem like the author's puppet. And then again, a lovely ending.
***1/2

[Bella Azam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yoko Tawada's Naked Eye was a complex, dreamy novel of self-identity, language and loss of our own voices amidst the strangers across countries. Its perpetual movement of narrative of our narrator, a young girl from Vietnam, Anh (not her real name) in first chapter, she is in East Berlin for a Youth Conference but was kidnapped by a man named Jorg, whisked away to West Germany's small town, Bochum. With language barrier and her being an illegal person in a different part of the country, she was forced to stay and unable to leave. One night, she left the place and mistakenly took a train to Paris when she intended to board a train to Moscow. This started a journey of our protagonist search for her home in a faraway foreign country, alone and lost. She met many people across her journey, learning new things in these places and in the center of it all, its the comfort of the films starred Catherine Deneuve had become her obsession and muse.

Naked Eye was amusing in its execution of chapters name following the different films by Catherine Denevue. There are interesting exploration on identity as Anh flitted from one place to another finding some sort of connection or a place to live in but ultimately her lack of effort to retrace her steps back to her own country, Vietnam was frustrating to read. In the first place, its absurd that a young girl of 16 years old was left to fend for herself when she came to East Berlin for a conference. The forced independence for her to stand by her own in a different country mad e her vulnerable to be taken away by a stranger. Even maddening, was this man Jorg was the epitome of evilness for forcing the girl to be his live-in wife and ridiculing her in every chance.

Do I find this delightful? I certainly so. There is surrealism to this story as we read from our narrator's voice but her voice is faded, almost silent as she is lost in her own thoughts and her monologues in the second POV was certainly interesting. But I found the detached tone to the girl's voice gave a this isolated feeling as we get more and more lost in her ways to find her home. Just like our narrator is lost in a different country, unable to speak the language and not speak at all even in her own native tongue that felt estranged to her in such place, I was also disoriented reading this. Some of its illusory imagery gave the story a perplexing vibe that left me wondering what exactly it was supposed to be but I'm in the ride on this so might as well enjoy it even if its weird at times

Thank you Definitelybooks for the review copy.

[Quân Khuê · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yoko Tawada là một nhà văn Nhật sống ở Đức, viết bằng cả tiếng Nhật lẫn tiếng Đức, đã có Mắt trần và Chàng chó được dich ở Việt Nam. Cần phân biệt nàng với Yoko Okawa, tác giả của Giáo sư và công thức toán, Quán trọ hoa diên vỹ, Kết tinh thầm lặng. Mắt trần in ở Việt Nam từ 2011 nhưng hầu như không ai biết tới. Tôi còn đọc Chàng chó qua bản tiếng Anh trước khi biết Tawada đã từng được dịch ở Việt Nam. Nàng tới Việt Nam qua bàn tay bà đỡ của NXB Phụ Nữ.

Tác giả Nhật viết bằng tiếng Đức, nhưng nhân vật chính trong Mắt trần lại là một cô gái Việt. Cô mười bảy, mười tám tuổi gì đó, được cử sang Đông Đức dự hội nghị thanh niên, nhưng rồi bị bắt cóc, bỏ trốn, và trôi dạt sang Paris. Không thị thực, không gia đình, không ngôn ngữ – cô tồn tại như một bóng ma trong lòng châu Âu, len lỏi qua các toa tàu, những căn phòng tạm bợ và những buổi sáng không biết mình đang ở đâu.

Kỳ lạ thay, thứ duy nhất cô bám víu vào là hình ảnh nữ minh tinh Catherine Deneuve. Cô xem đi xem lại các bộ phim của Deneuve, thuộc lòng từng cảnh, từng lời thoại, và dần dần trôi vào một thế giới nơi điện ảnh thay thế cho hiện thực – hay ít nhất, là một hiện thực dễ chịu hơn. Đôi lúc không phân biệt đâu là cảnh phim, đâu là chuyện đời cô. Vì sao lại là Catherine Deneuve? Không rõ lắm, nhưng có lẽ trong một thời đại nơi mọi thứ đều được xác định bằng giấy tờ và ranh giới, việc mơ về một gương mặt trên màn ảnh cũng là một cách để thể hiện khát vọng được hiện hữu.

Trừ Đông Dương, tôi chưa xem các phim khác có Catherine Deneuve. Nếu xem rồi đọc cuốn này chắc thích hơn, bởi mỗi chương sách được xây dựng quanh một cuốn phim mà Catherine Deneuve đóng. Ngoài ra, nếu chuộng logic sẽ thấy trong truyện quá nhiều thứ phi logic; tuy nhiên, có vẻ xây dựng một câu chuyện logic không phải là mối quan tâm của tác giả.

[Tonymess]

Thirteen chapters each named after a movie starring Catherine Deneuve. The title comes from Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ which opens with a close up of one of Deneuve’s eyes, the film closes with a pan of a room, stopping at a photo of Deneuve’s character as a young girl, looking outside the frame into space, the camera zooms closer and closer into her eye until the screen is black. “The End”.

Chapter one of this novel is called “Repulsion” and it opens with an eye….

I am going to immediately reread watching the 13 films before each chapter.

There’s so much packed into this work, written in German and Japanese (this edition translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German edition) about a Vietnamese girl who travels to East Berlin, is kidnapped and taken to Bochum in West Germany & when attempting to flee to Moscow ends up in Paris. She spends her days watching and rewatching Catherine Deneuve films in the cinema, despite not understanding the language. Displacement, language, colonisation (Vietnam was under French control!!) east/west, politics, images, movies, fiction, reality (although that is fiction), first person & second person narration, this is not an easy work but masterful it is.

On rereading I will post something at my blog about the 13 films, as that may prove useful for people to cross reference whilst reading the novel.

Love it & what an excuse to watch 13 Deneuve films quickly (most referenced I have seen and I do own quite a few on BluRay so not too hard an ask).

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es ist schwer, die Handlung von Yoko Tawadas Erzählung knapp herunterzubrechen, denn die Verstrickung zwischen Realität und Kino-Fiktion bestimmt die Handlung. Die Protagonistin, eine junge Vietnamesin, wird in die DDR nach Ostberlin geschickt, um dort einen Vortrag über die Gefahr des kapitalistischen westlichen Systems zu halten. In Berlin wird sie jedoch nach Bochum verschleppt, wo sie jahrelang von einem Deutschen sexuell missbraucht und versteckt wird. Sie hört von einer Zugverbindung von Frankreich nach Moskau, die durch Bochum verläuft und versucht auf diesem Wege in ihre sozialistische Heimat zu gelangen. Eine Frau, "Sie", hilft ihr, den Zug zu stoppen und sie kann ihn besteigen, fährt jedoch in die entgegengesetzte Richtung nach Paris. Dort bleibt sie viele Jahre ohne die Sprache zu lernen und ohne weiteres Bemühen nach Hause zu gelangen. Ihr begegnen ständig neue Menschen, die ihr helfen wollen und sie aufnehmen und sie entdeckt ihre Liebe zum Film. Dort sieht sie "Sie" in den verschiedensten Rollen durch die Jahre hinweg auf der Leinwand, wobei ihre fiktiven Leben immer mehr mit dem der Protagonistin verschmelzen.

"Tuong Linh schaute mich an und fragte, ob ich auch eine leidenschaftliche Kinogängerin sei. Ich antwortete sofort 'nein', bereute es und senkte den Blick, weil meine Wangen brannten. Man würde mir nicht glauben, dass ich bloß keinen anderen Ort zum Überleben hatte als bei Ihnen auf der Leinwand und nur deshalb immer da war."

Die Realitätsschilderungen und Erklärungen über den Film sind im fortschreitenden Handlungsverlauf kaum voneinander zu unterscheiden. Dass das junge Mädchen, welches verschleppt, genötigt und vergessen wurde, eine eigene Welt kreiert, ist daher nicht verwunderlich. Auch ihre sozialistisch-kommunistisch geprägten Moral-und Wertvorstellungen zerbrechen an dem sie umgebenden kapitalistischen System. Ihr unstetes Leben mag vereinzelt völlig irrational erscheinen, da sie sich krampfhaft auf eine Schauspielerin fixiert, die sie scheinbar nach Paris gebracht hat. Ob diese Begegnung an den Gleisen wirklich stattgefunden hat, kann bezweifelt werden, doch ihre ausweglose Situation erklärt diese Einbildung. Wer "Sie" am Ende ist, bleibt unklar.

Auch mir bleibt vieles unklar nach dem ersten Lesen. Die diffuse Art der Niederschrift hat mich zuerst irritiert und verwirrt, doch schnell konnte ich nach meinem Empfinden das reale Leben der Protagonistin vom Film unterscheiden. Am Ende bleibt es wohl jedem selbst überlassen, wo man die Grenzen zur Fiktion zieht. Ein verwirrendes, aber anregendes 4/5 ⭐️-Leseerlebnis.

[Andreea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye is strange, to say the least. It feels like watching a black-and-white, silent art film, where disconnected scenes unfold dreamlike, and the whole story seems absurd. It's, in a way, Kafka-esque, as the story makes absolutely no sense. Which I found brilliant. I found the narrative amusing and captivating in its own way.
However, what kept me going was the vibe, which reminded me of communist Romania and how the party would instil beliefs in people. The book was written in German first, then Japanese (Tawada said some sections came to her in Japanese).

The story follows a teenage Vietnamese girl who's accidentally kidnapped during a political trip to East Berlin and somehow, through odd circumstances, is stranded in Paris. From here, things spiral: she ends up living with a prostitute, a Vietnamese woman married to an older French man, and later on with a Vietnamese man without her ever learning the language. She is illegal, has no money and only her passports, and she just follows whoever speaks with her in a language she understands.

Here, she also develops an obsession with movies, spending every day at the cinema and has a crush on Catherine Deneuve
- each chapter is named after her movies (including one of my favourite movies of all time, Dancer in the Dark). She doesn't understand the films, and she interprets them in detail to the reader, putting her own meaning on the art. So, you have a combination of movie descriptions, fragments of conversations, confusion, and her wandering around Paris.
Throughout, Tawada includes commentary on communism and capitalism, with criticism for both.

So, there is no plot and no explanation. It's abstract but not dull. The book gives you a sense of disorientation, as if something is wrong - I kind of expected it to turn into a horror story - and nothing makes sense at all. Well, I loved it! If you like weird, absurd, a little feverish stories, this one is for you. I will definitely read it again, perhaps after I watch some Deneuve movies, to get all her references.

[GD · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, while it veers dangerously close to my least favorite kind of writing (stupid crazy people, usually women, doing stupid shit for no reason at all), this was interesting enough to keep me from focusing on that. It (vaguely) follows the story of a young Vietnamese woman who goes to East Berlin, gets kind of smuggled over the border into West Germany against her will, and jumps a train to Paris, where she spends most of the rest of the book wandering around and watching movies, obsessed with the actress Catherine Deneuve (the hot chick in The Hunger who makes out with Susan Sarandon). At the very end of the book her estranged ex-husband, who took her to West Germany, reappears and takes her back. Then the last chapter of the book didn't seem to really have anything to do with the rest of the book.

There are lots of interesting looks into the mind of propaganda-sensitive cold-war Communists, and a lot of interesting stuff about being totally alien and unwanted wherever you go. There is some similarity here with Paul Bowles and his brand of crazy chick wandering around doing nothing, but I think Yoko Tawada is much more interesting.

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! I wish you could give little hearts here like you can on Letterboxd. The Naked Eye I would classify along with Lote and probably others that aren’t coming to mind immediately as Book About Girl Who is Obsessed with Something in a Gay Way. In this case the narrator (Vietnamese, operating under various aliases, kidnapped to West Germany on a school trip to the GDR and then escaped accidentally to Paris) is obsessed with the actress Catherine Deneuve and goes to see her movies over and over again despite not understanding French. We get this crazy kind of nested story of Deneuve-as-actress across all her films, as if there’s a separate Deneuve that exists only in the cinematic universe, alongside the narrator’s own ramblings and run-ins and factually dubious but frankly compelling film interpretations. Everything about the plot is so improbable but in a way where you’re like oh yeah this is exactly what should be happening right now. Loved it.

[Elli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Endlich nochmal durchanalysiert und immer noch 4 ⭐️ auch wenn es pain war :)

[Natalie (CuriousReader) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada is the story of a young Vietnamese woman traveling to Berlin in order to participate in a lecture - only to be swept away to Bochum by a German man, later ending up in Paris with no money, family, or safety net to fall back on. It’s quite the whirlwind of a story - this woman, Anh is the name she gives herself, travels city to city, never settling down because she doesn’t have a legal presence in France and the further she gets from her starting point, the further away she is from any place she can call home. In Paris she falls in love with the movies, cinema, or in particular a certain french actress - Catherine Denevue. She goes to see her movies daily, feeling a strong pull towards her to the point of obsession. She becomes the lighthouse in her life, a guiding light and a point of grounding in her otherwise constantly shifting situation.

What I think this book does best is capturing the rootless and harsh existence of an illegal immigrant; her difficulty in doing anything because of her lack of papers, proving her legal existence, not being able to go to school or get a “real” job (she does eventually get work through the black market). While Anh is trying to form some kind of link to Paris, she finds herself unable to do so - this situation is made harder because of her language barrier. She doesn’t known German or French at the beginning, only Russian - which was the language she was meant to use in Berlin. Her lack of language becomes her lack of speech, she rarely communicates her thoughts or her feelings to those around her. The people in her life are constantly changing because she goes from one living situation to the next, being dependent on other people for a roof above her head. For a while she lives with a Vietnamese woman, Ai Van, with her french husband, Jean. Because she is dependent on them for a roof, pocket money, and food, she rarely voices her thoughts, wishes, or disagreements; her voice is strained because of her dependent position in the world. Rather than arguing with a person she will move on to a new place. Eventually she almost seems to lose her voice completely, so used to keeping it down or shut off.

The lack of language, the lack of place or home, and the way Anh clings to movies are the things that could’ve made this book absolutely wonderful, in my opinion. There are moments of absolute clarity in Tawada’s prose, that seem to capture something so fundamental in such a beautiful way, that I was mesmerized. The way Anh interacts with Denevue too, is interesting - she addresses her directly, as “you”. The narration itself felt like a smart way in playing with our interaction with media and art, and the narration further went to illustrate how Denevue has become the central point in Ahn’s life, that is always changing because of her different roles as an actress, and yet is the only thing that remains constant in her life.

You’d think I loved this book, and I did really like some parts of it. Ultimately though, it didn’t quite deliver on its promises. While the parts that dealt with Denevue were surely interesting from a purely creative point of view, it was a chore to read. The descriptions of different movies and roles were so lackluster that it felt more like I was reading synopses on IMDb rather than a novel. Taking this book on face value, it’s quite often dull as rock. It shifts so often, it’s hard to get a good grounding into it. It has the flow of a “stream-of-consciousness” narrative without really being inside someone’s consciousness. Yes, we do follow Anh’s thoughts and her shifting reality - but it’s very surface level in terms of her emotional reality. We see what people around her see; sometimes we can perhaps see what a rat would see, following along alleys and dark streets. But do we really see inside of her? I wouldn’t say so. Except through her connection to movies and Denevue. But that’s really my problem with this book. I feel strongly like the parts dealing with movies could’ve made this book really interesting, in telling the story through her interaction with the screen. It just never took off for me, it very rarely felt like the ‘discussion’ on movies were anything more than summaries. Maybe I would feel differently if I had seen all of the movies in question, but I doubt it. What initially drew me to this book, after all, was the mention of her obsession with Catherine Denevue - and while I haven’t seen all of her movies, I’ve seen a few. Even when those movies were mentioned, I felt absolutely nothing in the description of them. I actually started to dread when the narrative shifted to movies after the halfway point. I just wanted to stay linked to Anh herself; had the book been more focused on her I think I would’ve gotten along with it better.

So what can I say to sum this up? I feel like this book had all the potential to be a great novel, I think many of the ideas Tawada had for this book were interesting but didn’t work in execution. I think she captured beautifully Anh’s experience of being an outsider (whether that be due to her illegal presence, her lack of language, or anything else), I think some points of her prose were sharp and showed an eye for something I want to see more of. I think if you read this book without trying to read too much into it, it will be a dull experience. If that’s useful to anyone, I’m glad. If not, then you might want to give it a try anyway - it might surprise you. I will be trying more of Tawada’s writing because I felt like there was something in this book, a little something that clicked with me, and I will be looking to find more of that in her later books.

[Miss Bookiverse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Das war einfach nicht mein Fall. Es liest sich leicht, aber oft fand ich es auf inhaltlicher Ebene sehr unangenehm (besonders die Parts in Bochum) oder sogar langweilig, was vor allem auf die endlosen Beschreibungen von Filmen/Filmszenen mit Catherine Deneuve zutrifft. Ich kenne keinen der erwähnten Filme, vielleicht macht das etwas aus, und halte es irgendwie für Quatsch in einem Roman immer wieder Szenen aus anderen Werken wiederzugeben, obwohl die Vermischung von Kino und Realität, welche die Protagonistin durchlebt, durchaus ihren Reiz hat.

[Nguyên Trang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Không ngờ đọc tác giả Nhật Bản lại được nghe chuyện gái Việt Nam thế này. Có điều sách viết dở quá, bôi bác nhau nữa. Thấy profile tác giả khá kinh, lại còn thuộc nhóm có khả năng đoạt Nobel nên mới đọc. Thất vọng quá đê.

[ValTheBookEater]

surreal, astute, weird, slow, jumpy fever dream but I want to watch Catherine Deneuve films

[Luise Matilde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noch nie so übergriffig von einem Buch behandelt worden, es macht mich ja verantwortlich und missversteht mich als Schauspielerin (so wie die Protagonistin kann auch ich nichts richtig stellen angesichts den Anschuldigungen und den Bewunderungen). Also sehr krass. Habe erst beim lesen der anderen Rezensionen verstanden, dass es sich um eine echte Schauspielerin und existierende Filme handelt, aber das ist mir egal. Genial.

[Daisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an ambitious exercise, I imagine, to write. And it's not easy to read, sometimes tedious, sometimes poetic, sometimes impossible. It's almost a filmography of Catherine Deneuve told through the experiences of a naive, hallucinating, displaced Vietnamese woman. Every chapter is the title of a Deneuve movie and then what happens to the heroine echoes the plot or theme or symbols in that movie. Although this is a translation (the author wrote parts of this in Japanese and parts of it in German), I have a feeling that the way the events in each chapter are told or written, she pays homage to that film's director or that film's voice or vision. But I've only seen some of the movies, not all of them.
I wonder how Yoko Tawada thought of this. What was the one-line summary she told people when they asked her what she was working on? Simply stated?--the story of a young drifter obsessed with Catherine Deneuve. The why and how are more complicated. I almost gave up on this because it took more work to get through than what I usually like. But I guess I'm glad I finished it. It's strange.

I always got good grades in Russian, but there was one grammatical rule to which I had physical aversion: the genitive of negation. A person who was absent was no longer allowed to exist in the nominative case, as though he were no longer a subject. p. 7/8

As if you had already written a screenplay of your life when you were a child and later only accepted roles that fit into it. p. 198 about CD and about heroine

His spring rolls are making me more furious than grateful. p. 220

[Constance · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ethereal but uncompromising book. More poetry than prose.

[S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a light read, mostly cinematographic... I believe the author herself was drawn to French cinema, characteristically minimal over drama, yet passionately drifting to eccentricity... French cinema at least as it is depicted and used to be is an experimental arena for alien ideologies...
Perhaps that the narrator being lost in translation and facing the screen only describes the affluence of visual information... And language loses its use in that sense... I was closely interested in following a Russian speaking Vietnamese to Germany and France.. By the end something happens which gives an end to a mean of communicating but gives way to another... Language was never a barrier!

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

[Pauline Schuhmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich lese lieber Bücher, als ins Kino zu gehen.

[eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

need to watch the entirety of catherine deneuve’s œuvre to appreciate this more

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

A perfectly confusing book the point to which I fail to see. Our heroine Anh (her initial false name of the moment), is a young academically talented Vietnamese girl sent to East Berlin to give a speech at an International Youth Conference. Prior to presenting her speech, she is gotten drunk and kidnapped by a young man who takes her to Bochum, West Germany where he keeps her to be the mother of his children. She eventually leaves (escapes does not seem the appropriate term since she has a great deal of freedom of movement in Bochum), taking a train she believes will take her to Moscow from which she hopes to make her way back to Vietnam, but the train goes to Paris instead. She seems to drift through the succeeding years and the rest of the book. Things happen to her, her benefactors change, but she seems strangely comatose throughout, just drifting through life, as the storyline gets blurry as to what is actually happening, what is a movie our heroine is seeing or has seen, and what is her blended version of events. She frequently mentions her desire to learn French and then to attend university, but never seems to actually do very much to make either happen. The only constant in her life, other than poverty, rootlessness, and a seeming passionless indifference to events, seems to be her adoration of the actor Catherine Deneuve (chapter titles are the titles of movies Deneuve starred in, reflecting their mention in the storyline). In the last chapter she is an older woman living in Berlin, apparently never having gone back to Vietnam or attended university. So, I guess, we can take away from this that one early, albeit significant, event in life can derail, even destroy, a life. Okay.

[Noah Appelbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huh.

At one point, I was on the verge of bailing on this book because it just didn't seem very good. At one point, I was thinking very explicitly about how I was going to rate this book a 4, and composing a glowing review in my head.

While reading this, I lamented to a friend that the coolest thing about this book was that the manuscript was written in two alternating languages (German and Japanese), and that it was a shame that basically nobody would ever be able to read the original text. (The author completed translations into both languages, so that the book could be published.) Except! Except that this book varies wildly in quality from section to section, and I wonder if the legacy of two languages lives on in a sometimes unfortunate way. Certainly, I imagine that two rounds of full-on literary translation would do a number on pretty much any text. (This edition is translated into English from the German version, so the parts originally in Japanese have gotten the double whammy.)

Some parts of this book felt contrived beyond reasonable doubt. Some parts of this book were cloyingly precious. Some parts of this book were totally transcendent and absorbing. Something like 40% of this book was made up of detailed written descriptions of things that happened in movies, and somehow these parts also variously fit into the aforementioned categories.

Ultimately I liked this book, but don't be surprised if you find something that makes you put it down and never pick it up. Like I said, "huh."

[Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Or maybe two stars. It gripped me in bits and pieces but left me with nothing.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

- Read for class, made for a very annoying reading experience
- A little too artsy for my liking, class didn't help this at all

[Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

who's kathy

[kelly]

for some reason, i remember that in the year of 2019 i was dying to get hold of a copy of the naked eye but ultimately failing to locate it (the book, in its material form, happens to be just as obscure as its content). it's a personal (minor) philosophy of mine that there's a right time and place to meet certain texts—only then you will have the full capacity to succumb completely, instead of maintaining a curious (but passionate!) distance from it. for instance, reading bonjour tristesse when i was around the same age as françoise sagan when she wrote it made a lot of difference in how i received the novella and how i responded to the precocious narrator.

for that reason, i'm glad that i only managed to read the naked eye this year, having become a big fan of catherine deneuve. there's lots to be said about translation/borders/identity/displacement/immigration/cold war politics etc. but what i want to focus on in the thing i'm most fascinated by on a personal level: the relationship between star image and audience, how the films we love can become apart of us, how cataloguing what we watch can be even more telling than a diary at times...

i'm not quite ready to prostrate myself at the altar of catherine deneuve's image like our unnamed narrator, but going into this novel already being a big fan definitely made the reading experience a lot more personal. in many ways, the overarching plots and themes of deneuve's oeurve start to resemble the narrator's experience—the clinical tone in which violence is explored, and the themes of control and capture and class intermingled with surrealism made me think of deneuve's collaborations with buñuel. the focus on 'image' over straightforward words, for which the naked eye has been deemed a "cinema" novel, also ties in perfectly with the novel's contemplation of the silver screen's magnetic and absorbing qualities.

cinema as a way of understanding the world, overcoming divide, as its own oneiric language and grammar that surpasses cultural barriers and becomes meaningful because of its ability to become an individual experience.

there's a lot more to say about the novel but i'm just going to keep the review vague for now & return to it later when i have more of an understanding of it. an excellent novel! very glad to have read it.

[Daniel]

Das nackte Auge by Yoko Tawada
2000
(The Naked Eye in English)

***I'm not putting stars on my reviews***

Very odd novel. Tawada is a Japanese-born German & writes in both languages. In a German class I once read a text by her that was deemed of pedagogical value because it involved a fantasy about the gender of objects.

The plot: in the 80s a high-achieving Vietnamese student is picked to travel to East Germany to deliver a speech on US imperialism. While in Berlin, however, the unnamed protagonist is abducted by a villainous West German–who declares he is liberating her–and taken to the dull town of Bochum. She escapes and accidentally winds up in Paris, where she stays. She finds herself leading a precarious, picaresque life, understanding snatches of what’s going on. She also becomes obsessed w/ Catherine Deneuve. Each chapter is structured around a Deneuve film she sees.

The protagonist displays a disconcerting passivity. For instance, she never attempts to even contact anyone from her old life. Rather, she spends the book floating from one experience to the next. Friends, lovers, strangers appear & disappear; interpersonal tensions are left unresolved. At one point, she wanders to a parking lot in a banlieue. A man shows up in a car & she gets in. Without discussion he takes her to a cinema where she had arranged a date. We never see this man again.

Most of the book is about her film-going, which also figures her passivity. She focuses on bits of the movie that interest her: characters, images, shapes, sounds--hewing close to sensory experiences, w/o using context to overdetermine meaning. I suppose there’s a muted protest in there–after what’s happened to her, she suggests she has the right to spend the rest of her life watching films.

Meandering, phenomenological novels aren’t necessarily my thing but this one works for two reasons. 1) Even after a long stay in Western Europe, the protagonist maintains her dogmatic Vietnamese student’s outlook on capitalism, making hilariously weird & insightful comments on French society. 2) The protagonist’s displacement has something to say about the immigrant experience. In a way, Tawada has managed to turn the nouveau roman into social realism.