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A review by brice_mo
The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao
4.5
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.
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.