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?”

I expected this book to be an epistolary letter but it reads more like a stream of consciousness as it is quite vague on whether the narrator’s letters were being sent to a recipient or if it was more like a diary entry. She talks about her desire for this unnamed friend a lot (almost too much, the word ‘clitoris’ was a tad overused) and issues with her mother’s health. The writing was beautiful however the overall book just didn’t hold my interest enough and I found myself skimming through it. I do look forward to read what the author has stored for the future.

Thank you to netgalley and Melville Publishing for the ARC! ✨

On paper, The Italy Letters seems like exactly the type of book I should love, and I was so convinced from the first page that I would love it, but unfortunately it quickly went downhill for me. Told in an experimental form through a series of letters that the narrator is writing to the woman she is in love with, the book explores desire, and longing, and the pain of caring for a dying parent. The problem is, the format just did not work. Through this series of letters, the narrator often is regurgitating entire interactions that she has had with the receiver of the letters. For the whole book, I could not wrap my head around that and as the entire book was built on the back of these letters it made it very frustrating to read and it seemed like a different format could have much better suited this story. Also, while there were some beautifully written moments, most of it felt so incredibly overwrought.

This stream of consciousness novel is told in the letters of the narrator, helping her gambling addict mother in Las Vegas, to her lover in Italy. The style was distinct, and I love an epistolary novel. Overall, I enjoyed the language and tone of the story, but sometimes it felt like the narrator was just recapping what her lover told her already, which is helpful for us as readers but seemed a little unusual at times as writing between two characters. Overall, it's short and moves quickly, and I thought it was pretty solid.

been putting this off bc of weird formatting on the epub but was such a mistake. the stream of conciousness in beautiful language style totally works for me and this is a great addition to the genre.

Thanks to Melville House and NetGalley for this eARC!

I'm a huge fan of Vi Khi Nao's work, and this was no exception. I loved the letter format and how organic the storytelling felt through this medium. Nao's voice and writing is not one to be missed, and I'm surprised people aren't talking about her work more. I burned through this book pretty quickly, and I can't wait for the next one.

I was captivated by Vi Khi Nao’s writing in The Italy Letters. Raw, erotic, poetic, passionate, this novel is contextualized in today’s time and in the daily life of a Vietnamese immigrant lesbian writer with a gambling suicidal mother. The narrator (only named once) is obsessed by a straight woman in England. Most of the book is her fantasies about telling this woman who is about to get married to a man how she wants to have sex with her.
“My mother and I then fell into a second wave of sleep. When I woke, my body was swollen with desire for you and you had written me.”
These letters may also be fantasy. While the book addresses a you, it is not epistolary but a kind of stream of consciousness about the communication between them and within the narrator’s mind. Her passion for her beloved and her own discomfort with life pulls the reader into her mind.
There is a break from her obsession with the straight woman when she tries to live with roommate Cherimoya in Las Vegas, has an unsuccessful affair with her, and then gets attracted to her sister.
While the narrator is caretaking her mother and trying to keep her from gambling and wanting to end her life, she herself begins to wonder if life is worth living. Her mother brings in some Vietnamese culture as does the narrator preparing Pho and other dishes. In a way, she is like her mother but her obsession is women, especially the inaccessible married one in London.
Did her mother smell her sexual aromas? Yes, and there’s a lot about food. Periodic nonsequiturs, name-dropping of lesbian writers, of political figures and criminals with their sexual crimes give a sense of the current time period and at times the creepy side of life. How creepy is a country that would elect a kind of Hitler for president? (She thinks)
Vi’s teaching life and her poverty, her struggles with publishing as well as her own book of poetry, The Vanishing Point of Desire, all seem like characters in the novel.
The narrator’s poetic point of view is beautifully detailed in the book: “My desire for Cherimoya’s sister remained quiet like a plum.” I loved the way she talked so openly about her throbbing clitoris: “My body had become a pool of circular light, particularly near my clitoris.” But there is also an unrelenting dark side.
I wonder if it matters whether something is fictional or not. Vi animated everything as a character, even a tree in the end. It was a really fascinating read.
I appreciate the ARC preview from NetGalley. The book will be published in August.

This manuscript is a votive work to intimacy and generational love, a sweet and tangy mixture that highlights the quiet comfort of knowing a loved one. The prose is easy to follow and flows naturally between scenes and letters, there are tender moments that feel like the hand of a dear person brushing the hair from your face and others that sting with silent pain.
The main problem that I have found with the narration was how repetitive it started to feel after a while, the scenes and topics started to blend as there was no cataloguing or division and I found myself rather confused and with a diminishing interest.
The author is undoubtedly talented and I could see sparks of potential in certain sentences and ideas, but at last the narration dragged as there was no element to push it foreward.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book for review. Unfortunately, I hated every page of it. I suffered through, though, in hopes that it would get better, or that there would be any semblance of a plot in any part of it. There wasn't. It was all purple prose written in a desperate attempt to sound poetic but ultimately made little sense, random hate speech, and winding, spiraling, repetitive thoughts which were completely unproductive. One of the "letters" was 80 pages long. If I received an 80-page letter written like this, I would file for a restraining order.

This is a difficult book for me to rate. I think the contrast between the beautiful, poignantly written passages and the narrator being straight up horny was too much for me.

"The Italy Letters" is not your traditional novel. It's voyeuristic and hard to put down. Readers explore the deepest folds of the narrators mind in a series of letters to her Italian lover. Author Vi Khi Nao dissolves the traditional novel in this poetic telling.

Once you start this novel I recommend you stick with it. It's like riding through a dream and it's best to ride it until the end.

Thank you author Vi Khi Nao for bringing this book to readers, thank you Melville House Publishing, and thank you NetGalley for providing us readers with this title.

what a wonderful book. I very much enjoyed the style of writing and the flux of conscience while getting to know this unrequited love (or that we think it's unrequited). it was like invading a diary, raw and real and strange at times (like life is). and the writing was very poetic.

thank you melville house for the arc!

from the first sentence of this novel there was something that deeply irked me. the narrator refers to the work as an “epistolary letter,” which—epistolary is itself derived from a word meaning letter. im sure the narrator knows this.

so what is this experimental form? can these be considered letters, just because the narrator refers to “you,” even when these letters were never meant to be mailed, and they are not so much letters with clearly defined beginning and ends as they are diary entries? it is also clear throughout the novel that there exists another series of letters (not only letters, but poems, e-mails, a wide variety of forms) that we cannot see, corresponding between the two lovers. so why is this novel considered letters, exclusively? why is it so insistent on being a set of letters, when it can be anything else? all this to say—for a novel that hinges most of its content on the experimental epistolary form, it didn’t work for me, and i don’t get it. am i a traditionalist?

nao’s prose is fluid, with the familiarity of someone who’s written a lot. the descriptions are precise, they are visceral. but because of that, they are fantastically bad. it made me physically react, not in a good way. here is a passage about dead cockroaches:

In the morning, due to air deprivation, they lay dead with their spindly legs in the air as if begging sexually, “Please fuck me like a necrophiliac.” “Oh, just fuck me,” they seemed to say.

i’m surprised the narrator is not a virgin. because she reads like someone who has never had sex, but thinks that having shocking kinks will make her sexually desirable. this is what she says about an accused rapist, who was charged with strangling women he dated:

In the eyes of others, Jian Ghomeshi’s sexual preference appeared perverse, but I think his taste was like everyone’s else’s in the world.

i have no idea why the narrator goes on a tangent for several pages about Jian Ghomeshi, who was acquitted in 2016 even though he was most certainly guilty, and goes on for several passages about how women might have been believed if they were truthful. i can’t figure it out. for an experimental novel that clearly wants to exist independent of time—in the way that the narrator only ever loosely refers to markers of time—this topic ages the work very distinctively. and even if it were to survive time, why immortalize the event where an awful human being who never showed remorse for pathologically abusing women was acquitted, while taking only an ambivalent position on it?

last thing i’ll say is this: i am an east-asian immigrant in north america, who recently lost a parent after taking care of them for an extended illness, and who identifies as queer. i had also been in the academy. i am the exact audience for this novel, and yet i found it so repulsive and alienating to me that it reminded me how much i detest this kind of marketing, this kind of targeting.

there is an audience for this novel, probably, but it isn’t me.

Reading experimental fiction takes conviction and a taste acquired through accumulation of read texts. This is a story that doesn’t go anywhere. The title says nothing about the text. How the protagonist is telling the story is at odds with itself. There is a woman in London the protagonist claims to be writing letters. The letters might not exist. The protagonist is writing to someone, what she is writing is the text, and the someone also the text, words written by a sad woman who sometimes lives with her aging mother, writes, like the author of the book, experimental fiction, a sure way to poverty, and focuses a lot on the excitation of her clitoris’ sensations whenever she thinks of other women, specifically, the woman in London. The protagonist is in Vegas but she travels to other cities in the USA. What’s peculiar—let us not overlook the liar in the word peculiar—about her long letter possibly to herself, which isn’t actually a letter, is within her text she repeatedly retells her epistolary lover events of her own life in London as though the woman suffers from amnesia and must have her own past told to her. As time progresses, the protagonist’s writing becomes less addressed to her London pen pal and takes on the guise of sections of a fictional work-in-progress before turning into a reflective journal.

What is substantial content is equally balanced with form in Vi Khi Nao’s novel. Her novel is an example of William Gass’ description of the experimental novel as an ‘experimental construction’, as words on paper, in which one should not expect to take seriously or invest emotional concern as if one were engaged with real people. It’s only fiction. The kind of fiction with characters engaged in as little action possible, not real stories. Still, a certain type of reader will find The Italy Letters engaging and appealing and that the tone is the story.

Thank you to Melville House and NetGalley for an Advanced Reader’s Copy.

Thanks to NetGalley and Melville House for the ARC!

Vi Khi Nao’s "The Italy Letters" charts the ambiguous borders between the platonic and the erotic over a long-distance friendship, exploring the discomfort of intimacy that is strong enough to scaffold more.

Framed largely as a letter to the narrator’s friend and would-be lover, the book is stomach-turningly precise in its themes. In many narratives, love is framed as a culmination; in this book, it is an interruption as we follow a woman struggling to care for her mother. Desire just constantly chews at the margins of her life.

There are so many moments of shared history and history the narrator wishes were shared. The prose is filled with poetic non-sequiturs that somehow still feel right at home, the way one might fumble over too many words in the hope that something—anything—would further a relationship. Along the way, the narrator expresses uncertainty about her own capacity for love, questioning whether the desire is specifically tied to the friend or rooted there because it symbolizes a singularly healthy relationship. These ambiguities and complexities populate the book until it’s almost too much to bear.

I loved it.

Vi Khi Nao fashions every sentence into an artifact and asks each one to carry a difficult past and an imagined future, and it feels like a privilege to see an artist of this caliber at work.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Melville House Publishing for an advance copy of this novel about love, relationships, being a writer, and the joy of having someone to share your thoughts and dreams with, even if only in letters.

Love might be soft as an easy chair as a songwriter once said, but being in love, being in a relationship, is hard on the soul. By relationships I mean friends, family and those we want to be more with. Every relationship has doubts, fears, errors in meaning, errors in feeling. That fear of being honest, sharing the thoughts that clog our brains, and make humans the individuals that we are. Individuals who want to be a part of something. Even if the one we have an interest in is an ocean away, and is married. The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao is a novel told of love, lust life and letters, told longhand without the benefit of emojis, or even a good ole LOL.

The book is an epistolary novel about a a young queer Vietnamese American writer who is currently living in Las Vegas watching her mother die. The writer is dealing with an upcoming reading in Los Angles, meeting an old roommate/ girlfriend, past abusive relationships, her Mother's bankruptcy, and a love who lies over the ocean in Italy, with her husband. The writer creates a series of letters, broken into geographical locations. A few are begun in Las Vegas, the Midwest, and New England. All are stream of consciousness from news of the day about sex pests in the news, to past relationships, food, the writer's Mother and her health, and a little bit of spicy tales. From the trial dates a date can be determined but that is not important. From the letters we learn about the writer's state of mind. And how the writer's literary career is going Plus we see the complicated relationship between the mother and daughter. And how much the writer's lover means to the writer and her hanging on.

A slim book, but one that hits quite a wallop in many ways. Vi Khi Nao is one heck of a writer. Beng a grump most stories about love and being in love roll over me, but not this story. Within a few pages I was sucked into the tale, in awe at the skill of the author in keeping everything in line and interesting, while letting the narrator seem so scattered around. There is a method to the writing, and as things become well messier for the narrator, the story becomes clearer, and sadder in a why, and yet hopeful. One can tell that Vi Khi Nao is a poet for there are lines in here that just stood out, and stayed with me, even as I type this, I keep looking at my notes and going, darn that's real good. The language sweeps one in, even in the spicy writing this shows as there is far more emotion, feeling, desire and well eroticism than 100 clones of 50 Shades of Grey. There is even comments on the state of America shown by her mother's money and health issues, along with all the trials that the narrator is following on her phone.

This is the first I have read of Vi Khi Nao and I am excited to read more. There is a lot going on, some of which as a male I probably missed. The writing is so very good, the characters so interesting, even the mother's male friends are described so well one can see them in the mind's eye of the reader. A very good story, and I look forward to more by Vi Khi Nao.

This is one of those stream of consciousness books that kind of lack a narrative goal and you're just there to enjoy the ride. Quite fast read this had lot of really great and imaginative writing, and I really enjoyed lot of the themes here.

I do usually struggle little bit keeping my interest up with stream of consciousness writing and again towards the end I found myself struggling to finish this.

Overall still worthwhile read that I would recommend.

An interesting and thought provoking stream of consciousness book. I enjoyed the writing but it did take some time to adjust to it, especially since I'm not normally a fan of stream of consciousness writing. Loved the themes explored within.

Thank you to the publisher for the e-copy.

Emotional heart wrenching beautiful writing.The Italy Letters stays with you long after you read the last page.#netgalley #melvillehouse

an interesting premise and enjoyable writing, but I found myself drifting off while reading. it also took a while to actually be engaged with what was going on. might have been the right book but the wrong mood. if you’re into more experimental and vibe-heavy books, this is a good fit for you