The Naked Eye [Paperback]

A precocious Vietnamese high school student  known as the pupil with the iron blousein 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-abductorand 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.A distinguished contribution to the unique paranoid style of the new European novel.Her finest stories dramatize the fate of the individual in a mobilized world.Tawadas chilling evocations of disorientation are the peers of Paul Bowles most chilling stories.Honorable Mention: one of the 10 Best Books of 2009.Tawadas slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency.Michael Porter,