Surrealist novel The Naked Eye tells of emigre experience

Ostensibly a novel about an abducted Vietnamese woman's obsession with watching French screen legend Catherine Deneuve in Paris' cinemas, Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye is in fact a surrealist novel of ideas about exile, aphasia and leading a vicarious life through art.

- Shawn Hoo

THE NAKED EYE By Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky Fiction/Granta Books/Hardcover/ 240 pages/$34.95

In 1985, as Cold War tensions between the Western and Eastern blocs begin to ease with the ascension of Soviet reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, a patriotic Vietnamese teenager is sent on a trip to East Berlin to make a speech in Russian.

Before she delivers it, she is abducted in a Kafkaesque frenzy to the west of the Berlin Wall - where she refuses to learn German - and ends up on a train to Paris (she never learns French), where she becomes a Deneuve fangirl.

Each of its 13 comic chapters is named after a Deneuve film - from erotic horror film The Hunger (1983), where the actress plays a bloodthirsty and snow-skinned vampire; to Indochine (1992), in which Deneuve is a French plantation owner who falls in love with the same French navy officer as her adopted Vietnamese daughter.

As life imitates art, the narrator's life unfolds like a perverse parody of Deneuve's oeuvre.