Member Review

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.