Vaporetto 13: A Novel

Vaporetto 13 is a mystery novel set mainly in Venice, Italy, by Robert Girardi. The title refers to the Vaporetto, which is a motorized water taxi commonly used in Venice, Italy.

Vaporetto 13
First edition
AuthorRobert Girardi
Cover artistTatiana Sayig
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreMystery novel
PublisherDelacorte
Publication date
1997
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages197 pp
ISBN0-385-31938-X
OCLC36662881
813/.54 21
LC ClassPS3557.I694 V3 1997

Plot

Jack Squire is a currency trader from Washington, D.C. on assignment to Venice, where he discovers both the light and dark of the city. Caterina is the girl from Venice who haunts Jack Squire.

Publishing history

Published by a Delacorte in 1997, the third of four by Girardi that they carried.

Criticism

Kirkus, 08/15/1997 "For as long as the tale's dream state is sustained, the result is exquisite and eerie."

Literary Review, January 1998 "Girardi elevates the commonplace theme of spirituality versus Mammon into a haunting fantasy." — Lisa Allardice

Times Literary Supplement, 03/06/1998 "Girardi's stories operate at the fringes of their genre, where actualized metaphor blurs into merely improbable realism; he has a good eye for the details which make the supernatural or flamboyant plausible....The sense of the gradual meltdown of his life is precisely handled....There are moments of closely imagined strangeness....[T]he weirdness is balanced by the quotidian Venice..., a bourgeois city of baptisms and adultery."[1]

The New York Times Book Review, 11/30/1997 "...Girardi suffuses his narrative with rich descriptions of the food, fashion, traditions and architecture of Venice. With this artful novel, he invites us to put aside our rational skepticism and enter a world where the past is still hauntingly present."[2] — Malachy Duffy,

San Fransicisco Chronicle 10/26/97 "Surprisingly, the ghost story and the morality tale don't clash but fit together nicely. Where Girardi goes astray is in his occasionally purple passages and obvious, over-the-top effects: Making love to Caterina, Jack finds her <<cold as stone>> and thinks <<or a quick, strange moment of grave markers and tombs.>> But Girardi succeeds in making our modern, soulless world seem far more frightening than whatever specters might haunt us from the past."[3] - Alix Madrigal

gollark: I know some of the letters, at least.
gollark: This is neat: https://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/
gollark: I programmed some drones to follow random players near spawn.
gollark: I'd rather not normalize increased spying. I don't think Steam is *too* bad for that, and quite a few of my games run directly without it anyway.
gollark: I don't really trust Epic Games to not do evil things, and in any case can't actually run their launcher on Linux.

References
  1. "The Times & The Sunday Times". Thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  2. Malachy Duffy. "Undeath in Venice". Nytimes.com. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  3. Alix Madrigal (26 October 1997). "Ghosts of Venice Speak to a Vapid Modern World". Sfgate.com. Retrieved 13 February 2019.


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