Das nackte Auge (The Naked Eye), Yoko Tawada (2004, Verlag Claudia Gehrke)
Η χορτοφάγος (The Vegetarian), Han Kang, tr. Αμαλία Τζιώτη (2007, Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη)
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong (2019, Penguin)

***

I ordered Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye after I’d read that she started writing it in Japanese (her mother tongue) but switched to German half way through, an adopted language, as she’d been studying and living in Germany for many years. I identify strongly with this kind of polyglot conundrum. Would I be able to write this post in German (my mother tongue)? I think not. My mind has been pummelled to mush by the staccato of English. I’m afraid I cannot organically string together German words of many syllables anymore. Scheisse – not a four letter word nor even a monosyllabic one.

Tawada’s typical concern is indeed the strangeness of a foreign culture – how long enough exposure to one reconfigures your identity and ultimately leaves you alienated, to a degree, from your own roots. In The Naked Eye, the Vietnamese protagonist Anh is on a propaganda visit to East Berlin in 1988 when she’s first abducted to West Germany and then finds her way to Paris where she lives a suspended existence for years, crashing with a series of acquaintances, never assimilating but also not making serious attempts at a return to her homeland.

Anh becomes obsessed with Catherine Deneuve and spends her days at the cinema watching the same films over and over. Each chapter in the book takes its title from a Deneuve film, with Ahn reflecting on it and the events in her life often mirroring the film’s in a slightly contrived way. So in the chapter named after The Hunger (Scott 1983), starring Deneuve and David Bowie as a vampire couple, Ahn gets paid to offer up her skin and blood for clinical trials of questionable ethical standards.

Deneuve sidebar: I agree with Katya that the best Deneuve film, the one that early on showed her on a singular path, is Belle de Jour (Buñuel 1967) in which she plays a bourgeois housewife who finds a sort of fulfilment working in a brothel. My hot take: the recent Babygirl (Reijn 2024) was a remake in spirit, this time with Nicole Kidman – arguably the only anglophone actress to match Deneuve’s stylish disaffection – as the model wife who explores the cracks in her model facade.

Ahn’s interpretation of what’s happening on screen is refracted through multiple layers of alienation. Her development seems arrested around her late teens, around the time she got to Europe and started living in the margins. She hasn’t shaken the communist propaganda of her upbringing. She never really learns French so relies mostly on the visual language of films (I assume this is the “naked eye” of the book’s title). In the best bits Tawada mines this for satirical effect. In the chapter on Belle de Jour Ahn observes (translation from German my own):

I didn’t know what one calls this salon, where women play cards with each other and wait for strange men. I picked out the word “maison” and after that something like “publique”. A public house, to me, would be a museum or a library, for example, where everyone can go. I had learned in school that a capitalist society as a whole was a brothel. Therefore a woman who works in a brothel would be a natural part of this society.

Tawada doesn’t mask the artifice of the Deneuve superstructure and its sometimes jarring jump cuts. It felt a bit too programmatic and episodic to me, even if intentionally so. I couldn’t say if it’s just due to my own distance from the language, but the German prose read spiky to me, a precious foreign artifact cradled with satin gloves and turned towards the light this way and that way by Tawada. This serves a story about what’s lost in translation rather well though.

***

In parallel (παράλληλα) I’ve been reading a Greek translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, very slowly, over the course of many weeks. Initially, I was puzzling over a couple of sentences per day. Gradually beefing up my vocabulary and getting better at parsing Nobel Prize-level grammar, I have now settled in at 2 to 3 pages per day. This seems to be a stable equilibrium where I can extract 10 useful words or phrases (φράση) to learn each day, a rate at which I can reasonably retain the new vocabulary. (Finishing the book is still going to take weeks, I’m about two thirds through now.)

Of course I wasn’t a beginner at Greek – I’ve been studying it on an off for more than 10 years – but this is the first time I’ve given sustained attention to a text not written for beginners. I should have started doing this so much earlier! I’m much more engaged than when I was using “easy Greek” readers, inherently dull and facile like a 4th grade reading assignment, and I’ve made concomitant progress. Over the course of a few weeks I’ve matured from a child that can only name basic emotions like joy (χαρά) and anger (θυμός) to a young adult disaggregating nuanced psychological (ψυχολογικό) states like hesitation (δισταγμός), disapproval (αποδοκιμασία), disgust (αηδία or απέχθεια), kindness (καλοσύνη), satisfaction (ικανοποίηση), obsession (εμμονή).

It turns out, the way a great writer like Kang crafts an effective novel supports my language acquisition almost as an unintended side effect. My slow, atomised (ατομωμένο) reading really made me aware of her technical (τεχνικό) mastery: naturalistic dialogue (διάλογος), complex inner lives that do touch on a range of emotions and – especially important to pick up balanced vocabulary – writing that considers all the senses. Her characters (χαρακτήρες) see, hear, touch, smell and taste in equal measures.

Since I haven’t finished the book I will reserve judgment. So far the story is a little strange, as are the characters, with motivations that are hard to make sense of. But who’s to tell this isn’t just the alienating effect of a foreign (to me) Korean culture filtered through my imperfect Greek. I’ve been enjoying this one more for the language challenge than the novel as such.

To paraphrase (να παραφράσω) Lydia Davis: The fun part about writing in English is the purposeful mixing of its parallel (παράλληλο) Germanic and Latinate vocabularies, which I also like to think of as the staccato and legato registers. Awkwardly squeezed in between those two of course lurks a Greek lexicon (λεξικό) which I’m happy to have developed a good intuition for at this point. I highlighted the Greek roots of English words in red above.

***

I had a fitting book in my unread pile to round out this triptych: Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I knew was about Vietnamese immigrants to the US. It’s hard to approach such a bestseller without bias, hyped as it’s been by disparate literary giants Oprah and Dua Lipa. I did my best to shift my expectations into neutral.

Vuong tells the story of Little Dog, who arrives to the US from Vietnam as a young boy and grows up in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 90s and aughts. He lives with his mother and grandmother, both scarred by the Vietnam War in their own way, and the three of them learn to navigate this incongruent place together. Little Dog explores his teenage sexuality through an enduring friendship/affair with local bad boy Trevor, an unlikely coupling since Trevor is many things that Little Dog is not – white, reckless, unimpeachably manly. The opioid crisis rips through the community and ultimately claims Trevor’s life. Little Dog’s is the alienation of an immigrant from his adopted home, of an American from his family rooted in a distant land, and that of a boy raised in a household of women from an environment that expects him to perform masculinity.

The actual coming-of-age plot is thin. What I found most compelling were the interspersed bits of family history, following the mother’s and grandmother’s lives in Vietnam during and after the war. I didn’t particularly care for the book’s much-lauded framing device, a letter from Little Dog to his (illiterate) mother, and Vuong frequently drops the letter writing voice anyway when it impedes the storytelling. Overall, I was just feeling indifferent about the book – I knew I wouldn’t remember much about it a year from now.

Then something curious happened just as I was turning the last pages of the book: the London Review of Books published an utter evisceration of Ocean Vuong by Tom Crewe. Crewe covers both Vuong novels and mainly bemoans what he experiences as insufferably stylised prose and as sentimentality, and I can’t overstate how brutal it is (“one of the worst ordeals of my reading life”). It’s quite something. I am far from an LRB completionist, to be clear, but I don’t remember them ever reading any one author for filth to this degree.

For the record, the LRB’s editorial choices are inscrutable to me at the best of times. Every other issue will have one article relevant to my interests, just valuable enough to keep the subscription. But I skip over large parts of the rest; the esoteric preoccupations with niche non-fiction, with antiquity and with socialist commentary, always detached from contemporary life just so, in a way that I suspect is tuned to the ossified taste of an Oxbrigde educated pensioner who lives in Islington or Hampstead, North London.

In fact, when I imagine the prototypical LRB subscriber, a slightly younger Alan Bennett (✅ Oxbridge, ✅ formerly of North London) appears in my mind’s eye, certainly cosmopolitan, certainly pushing boundaries at points in his life, yet maintaining staid respectability through a very British class consciousness, an intellectual seriousness plus a suit and tie.

The gulf between that subscriber and an immigrant child in 90s Hartford is almost unbridgeable. I suppose the LRB has nothing to lose from the panning of Ocean Vuong. Still, with so much pannable work to go around, why him? I’m guessing the inexplicably broad appeal (again: Oprah, Dua Lipa, million+ copies sold) of his “gay” and “literary” novel makes him a target.

While reading Briefly Gorgeous I was occasionally reminded of another “gay” and “literary” novel that similarly, inexplicably acquired a large, mostly female readership: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Yanagihara’s whole mode of operation is an aesthetics of suffering, her protagonist subjected to gut-wrenching, relentless and, in my opinion, pornographic abuse, while presenting the resulting trauma as a sort of virtue. Vuong taps into a similar, inappropriately beatific register sometimes when he uses heightened language to describe awful situations. While I’m indifferent about Vuong though, I truly hated A Little Life which, to their credit, the LRB did pan back in 2015.