The Italy Letters

Nao (Swimming with Dead Stars) delivers an incisive epistolary novel about a Vietnamese American writer’s economic hardship and queer desire. The unnamed narrator, who’s broke and desperate after losing her bid for a professorship, writes, but does not send, a series of letters to her poet friend in London. In them, she mixes quotidian details of her everyday life with rants on the pitfalls of academia and sorrowful descriptions of her mother’s severe pain from bronchitis and suicidal feelings. Only in these unsent letters does the narrator confess her lust for her friend, as she’s worried her feelings are unrequited and doesn’t want to damage her friend’s marriage. The narrator’s missives are full of complex issues lacking easy solutions: her inability to feel an emotional connection in romantic relationships due to being abused; her mother’s tendency to make the narrator feel guilty for her suffering; and her precarious living situation with a friend who lets her slide on rent in exchange for sex and household chores. In fluid stream of consciousness, the narrator conveys her external struggles and her inner passion. The result is a one-sided exchange that explodes with feeling. (Aug.)