A precocious Vietnamese high school student — known as the pupil with“the iron blouse”—in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an InternationalYouth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparingto present her paper in Russian on “Vietnam as a Victim of AmericanImperialism,” she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town inWest Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom withher lover-abductor—and though “the Berlin Wall was said to be moredifficult to break through than the Great Wall of China” — she escapeson a train to Moscow . . . but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone,broke, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) losesherself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin.<br /><br />Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils ofa person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjectedto some vampire-like skin experiments), <em>The Naked Eye</em> is anovel that is as surprising as it is delightful—each of the thirteenchapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve's films. “As faras I was concerned,” the narrator says while watching Deneuve on thescreen, “the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.”By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story andviewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer anddance.