I loved this book and was enthralled with the writing. I loved the character study. Would read more from the author!

(3/5, rounded up)
Short & sweet with somewhat unique formatting I enjoyed. It was a quick read that I'd recommend if you're in a slump or want a spicier palate cleanser.

I have to admit this was my first of Vi Khi Nao's writing. I plan to seek out more now, that's for sure! I can understand the hype after experiencing it myself.

I would have gotten to this ARC much sooner, but sadly wasn't accepted for review until after its pub date so it admittedly lost some of its luster compared to my other, truly "Advanced", copies.

{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Vi Khi Nao and Melville House for the DLC in exchange for my honest review!}

Unfortunately I just can't get into this one, it sounded right up my street but I'm bored and can't bring myself to finish as it just isn't working for me.

Thank you Vi Khi Nao, Melville House Publishing, and NetGalley for this ARC!The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao is a deeply introspective and experimental work that blurs the line between prose and poetry. Written as a series of letters, the book captures a range of emotions and philosophical musings on love, art, longing, and the complexities of human relationships. Thank you to Vi Khi Nao, Melville House Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC!

This book is about an unnamed narrator who in a series of letters expresses her sensual and raw love for her friend. At the same time as she’s tackling her unbearable desire for said friend, she is also trying to figure out how to take care of her mentally ill mother.

I will not lie, it took me some time to actually get into this book. Certain descriptions of the narrators sexual lust caught me a little off guard but it didn’t take me long to adjust to the writing and start appreciating it instead. The way she describes and depicts her love and desire is truly beautiful and raw.

Throughout the letters she also starts reflecting on how different the relationship between her and her lover is compared to her previous abusive relationships. She begins contemplating if this love and attraction is really genuine or if she’s rather more attracted to a having a healthy relationship.

Unfortunately I have forgotten a few things since finishing this book since it’s been awhile (oops), but I did like it and if you enjoy no plot just sad and reminiscent vibes books then I highly recommend it!

"𝘈𝘯𝘥, 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘥𝘦, 𝘪𝘧 𝘐 𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺, 𝘐 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘻𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘰 𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨."

There comes a book every so often that sits in my own uncomfortably that it slaps me awake at night to tell me that there is so much wrong in me that needs correcting. And the first steps in the corrections is to see it, acknowledge it, and then tackle it.

In epistolary form, we grapple with the fraught mother-daughter relationship looking over love, lust, being poor and unstable while looking for will in God and guilt, all with the Vietnamese in Vegas backdrop.

This is all personal. Hits home too closely. There is a small strip of land, a desolate plaza for Vietnamese food that seems pangea’d from Little Saigon in California that floats by itself 15 minutes away from the Las Vegas strip. It’s an alienation that I always coupled with the oddness that was Sin City itself, but there is another kind of alienation growing up Vietnamese in America that I could never fully register.

Amalgamations of this alienation exist in the text. Where I feel Moshfegh examines disgust in the human body, Nao examines it in the human spirit.

Many times over, in Nao’s even balance between melodrama and matter-of-fact despair and delusion, embarrassment, awkwardness, shame, repulsion, fascination, and utter shock, in humor and truth, washed over me that elevated me into reality.

Does that make sense?
An elevation into reality?
The saturation a bit stronger, the feelings a bit tighter. Nothing felt wide or far off. Everything felt magnified. I could see the pores of life, the sores of past sorrows gaping open, unapologetically.

But the great sorrow that encompasses the book is actually in how lonely this entire experience is because it is written in the form of a letter, a message that ends up faulting into the dust of ashes. Sent, unsent, it doesn’t matter, but it is from one perspective. One voice, one soul. Trapped in the self too much that there is no possibility of an elsewhere.

And this is life.

“𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘪𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰, 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬.
𝘠𝘦𝘵, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘐 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰, 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘐 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘣 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘢𝘥𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴?"

This is a deeply intimate and such a vulnerable book. Immediately I was drawn in. The conscious narrative battling her family issues, career problems, sensual/sexual need. There has been a many a times where I would read a paragraph and I would just get goosebumps.

I can see how not everyone may enjoy this book, but as a queer AAPI women, I felt like I was reading a friend's letters. I understood the writer.

This was an interesting book. However overall I’m probably not the right reader to be able to fully enjoy it. The writing was very poetic and loved the narrators POV. But I had trouble really getting into this book. It was mainly vibes than plot, and even though that can be great, it just wasn't for me.

3.5 stars

The Italy Letters are told as a long, rambling correspondence. I think the best format for reading here might be audiobook with a good narrator. The writing here was lovely in places and the story sneaks some deep topics into this novel. But, the form and essential plotlessness made this one not a fav for me.

The Italy Letters is a moving recollection of relationships and a burning desire for something more. Vi Khi Nao's writing is potent and captivating, I couldn't put the book down after reading the introduction. The stream-of-consciousness narrative and overactive mind make the narrator very realistic, but at times, overwhelming in how she seeks to help her mother battle insomnia, pursue her career, and grapple with her desire for sensual touch. I found the book's pace and change of place very enjoyable, Vi Khi Nao's place-naming and descriptions are thorough and poetic. This epistolary novel is relevant and fascinating in how the narrator finds her sense of self through her relationships with food, culture, landscape, and letter-writing in our digital age. Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It's my first time reading a stream of consciousness book, so I didn't know what to expect.
I was really surprised with how smooth the read was. I went from one page to another, following the thoughts of the narrator. This book is more vibes than plot.   And the vibes were confusing. Our narrator is a single lesbian struggling with everything: she is poor, even though she wrote a lot of books and got some awards; she lives with her sick, depressed mother; she's in love with a woman she writes this letter for; she loves and hates her friend and sometimes roommate. So there's a lot going on, but at the same time there isn't; we are just jumping from thought to thought.

Everything is composed like a long letter to the narrator's friend (and love object), but it feels more like a diary, especially when she describes the whole conversation with a supposed receiver. There's a lot of eroticism in the story; our narrator mentions her desires a lot, but there's also a lot of loneliness; she's clearly depressed and talks about ending her life quite a few times.
I liked some aspects of this book, but overall I don't think it's my genre, it's just too chaotic.

I found myself mesmerized while reading The Italy Letters. Vi Khi Nao's writing style is stunning, poetic and sultry and addictive. Despite the often somber premise, I found every moment enticing. I'm looking forward to hopefully reading more work from this author in the future.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

Unfortunately the authors writing style isn’t my favorite and I found the story difficult to get through. But the story itself and the depth of emotion to it was wonderful

This book surprised me! I was taken by the blurb/synopsis and then the first couple of pages I felt discomfort. The stream of conscious style writing can be very propulsive and it's easy to rapidly read and not take in what's actually being said. The tone and register of this book is quite darkly comic. The unnamed main character desire her woman (heterosexual, married) friend. They desire economic stablitity. They want their mother to live, but to also stop depending on them. We learn all of this as the reader, parsing the MC's internal monologue. Nao's use of metaphor, allusions and satire touches on the immigrant experience, sapphic love, the uses of the erotic and current affairs in the book's timeframe (e.g. Oscar Pistorious case). If you don't pay attention to this book you could write it off as an intense, over-the-top read, but it's incredibly clever and poignant. Poetic. Reminds me of Olivia Laing's Crudo, except actually good. Thanks to NetGalley and Melville House for the e-ARC!

The Italy Letters is a slim novel by the Vietnamese American writer Vi Khi Nao, just released in the United States.
Vi Khi Nao is a very prolific writer, poet and artist, she lives in Iowa City. She has the gift to blend different genres together, creating HYBRID novels such as The Italy Letters. The Italy Letters is a suburban epistolary novel, with an autobiographical touch, if I may say so. A stream of consciousness about love, intimacy, identity, immigration and food.
The cover is very interesting: it shows a naked back of a woman embracing a lemon in her arm.
The lemon embodies different meanings in the novel:
Italy, Napoli and love in its splendor and harshness.
The plot is simple: the narrator, who is in my opinion, the writer, lives in Las Vegas, 'a very beautiful city, 'for its bright light and its angels of darkness’, that she had learned to love slowly. She is Vietnamese American and lives there with her 67-year-old convalescent mother who ‘has had a hard, torturous life’.
The narrator in the book informs us of the letters she writes to her beloved while taking care of her mother.
Her beloved is what Beatrice is for Dante, an angelic creature. She is an italian poetess from Napoli, 'born and raised in New York', cisgender and who lives with her husband in London. She is nicknamed Gatto. This is clearly an impossible love that generates a strong depression in the protagonist's soul, but at the same time gives her the strength to continue living.
In The Italy Letters four cities frame the story: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Iowa and Boston. The part dedicated to Las Vegas is the most beautiful, it is the city where the author’s creative pen was born and formed. Food is an important aspect of the story, it represents intimacy and identity, culture and traditions of countless migrations. Among many vietnamese foods, made of a few simple ingredients that are available in U.S., the narrator mentions many traditional dishes including (banh xéo with nuoc mam), vietnamese crepes with fish sauce. For Vi, the latter embodies the taste of the vietnamese diaspora in the Pacific Ocean:

‘ I believe the reason why I loved fish sauce was because it embodied the sea for me. Specifically, the Pacific Ocean where I spent three days and three nights inside the sarcophagal body of the boat. We were trying to escape Vietnam, my family of six, with other families, too. There were thirty of us in a tiny boat. The fish sauce seemed to coat and distill the salt water of the ocean.’

In addition, the fish sauce represents her identity as a vietnamese american lesbian. Since everyone has their own food, the pages are colored by the flavour of the Neapolitan , American, Korean and European cuisine.
Furthermore, food is also the metaphor of sex, violent love and abuse.
In conclusion, I may say that 'The Italy Letters' can be considered the novel of the writer's adulthood. It is a novel that focuses its strength on the analysis and personal, sometimes disruptive, implications of loving passion and desire towards the loved one.
Translation into Italian (also of the author's poems) is desirable.
I recommend it to an adult female audience.
Rating: 4/5

Cw: rape, abuse.

Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House for providing me with a free reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was pretty intriguing for me. I like that we never saw the response to the letters that were being written and we were just surmising what was said through the narrator. However, I think this book overstays its welcome a little bit. After a while the writing started to seem repetitive and was just repeating the same points. I think if it was cut down a little and focused on the transitions the narrator was going through while writing them it would have been more intriguing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Melville House for the eARC!

While this book was interesting, it was difficult to fully enjoy because there was overall a lack of plot to it. I've seen multiple reviews that comment on the fact that it was too "stream of conscious" and I have to agree with them. I enjoy being in a narrator's head, but there is alway a limit to how much you enjoy this, and this book was the limit. The writing itself was gorgeous and this is what had me finish the book. I wish there would have been more plot to these letters. Instead of being told what has already happened, I would have preferred it feeling as though I am experiencing it with the narrator.

This was definitely an interesting and different read with a unique perspective. I think overall it would be a 3.5 for me but I definitely want to check out more by this author!

Unfortunately, I really didn't care for this. I love a good stream-of-consciousness, but the way this one was done didn't work for me. It felt overwritten to the point of circling back around to shallow and pretentious rather than literary or an actual, nuanced discussion of anything. The writing wasn't fundamentally terrible, but definitely excessively purple and convoluted, and I ran across multiple things that were punctuated incorrectly or structured so as to be grammatically meaningless. Getting this deep into a character's head and thoughts rarely leaves me feeling so detached and lacking understanding of them as a person. The format didn't do it for me. This one is weird, and not in a particularly fun or subversive way.

I would consider myself a fan of the stream of consciousness narrative and books without plots, but this was too stream of consciousness-y and had too little plot for even me to enjoy. It felt like I was just reading every random thought of this person, and all of them felt so watered down and shallow. It’s not even that this book was bad per se, it’s just that I found literally zero value in it and the only thought I was left with when I finished this one was, “What was the point?”