Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna by Mario Giordano

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages, $26
Translated by John Brownjohn from the German

Wait, I’m still laughing. Okay, I’m better now. Here’s the review.

Mario Giordano, a German, has written a savory Sicilian mystery (in German). There is a lot to recommend it, not least of which is that the Auntie Poldi of the title is brash, larger-than-life, in her sixties, never leaves home without her wig, and is determined to drink herself to death in the land of her late ex-husband’s birth.

Isolde “Poldi” Oberreiter speaks Sicilian (not Italian, although she speaks that as well) and has been adopted by her ex-husband’s large, exuberant family. Peppe’s sisters are good cooks and kind-hearted, and Poldi is in need of both to mend her storm-tossed mind. We do not know the whole story about what brought Poldi to Sicily, but hints were dropped in the first book (“Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions”) and hints continue to fall in this book like ash from a volcano.

Most of Peppe’s family returned to Sicily, except for a brother who also settled in Germany. The narrator is the German-born son of Peppe’s brother. He becomes the idiotic Watson to Poldi’s Daliesque Sherlock Holmes. In bits and pieces Poldi reveals her latest caper (and her personal audacious and brazen behavior) to her nephew, who in the portrayal of himself in the story has not yet come to the obvious conclusion that he should be her chronicler. He has been imported from Germany by his Sicilian aunts to help control Poldi. Her drinking is at a toxic level, her amateur investigating has proven dangerous, and she would have to check “complicated” on Facebook to describe her love life. Surely, the young nameless nephew (although I vaguely remember he was named in the first book) can help straighten Poldi out. However, when last we see him in this book, he has learned to drink and smoke excessively on Poldi’s terrace.

Just a few months after solving her first Sicilian murder, she encounters another mystery and even discovers one of the murder victims all by herself. But the first mysterious death is that of Lady, her neighbor’s beloved dog. He was poisoned and Poldi is determined to find out what heartless bastard (or bastardess) did the deed. Soon a second body is on Poldi’s radar; Elisa Puglisi, a district attorney who was part of the anti-Mafia prosecution department, has been murdered.

The police detective in charge of the investigation is her lover, Vito Montana. He has learned to suffer her interference, because, frankly, what could he do to stop her? She is the original irresistible force. We learn more about Poldi’s love life than that of most of the protagonists of other mystery series put together. She regales her nephew, and thus us, with admiring details of the male form, both generally and specifically. Nevertheless, she eventually gets around to the point and sniffs out clues and applies her vast knowledge — according to her — of human nature to resolving problems.

…[M]y Auntie Poldi already lived on the knife edge between joie de vivre and melancholy. The least she wanted was to straighten things out, because straightening things out was always something of an aid to getting over her fits of depression.

Here is one of Poldi’s pronouncements:

…[H]appiness possessed a simple binary structure, and the whole of human existence was suspended between two relatively distant poles. Between heaven and hell, love and ignorance, responsibility and recklessness, splendour and scuzz, the essential and the dispensable. And within this dual cosmic structure there existed only two kinds of people: the deliziosi and the spaventosi, the charming and the frightful. Rule of thumb: house guests, friends and dogs are always deliziosi, the rest are spaventosi.

Aside from the kind of rough humor that makes me cackle, there are descriptions of the food and scenery that makes me want to hop on my Vespa and drive to Poldi’s door, even if the neighborly Etna is actively spewing forth ashy dark clouds. “Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna” is generous with love for Sicily and provides good entertainment with its simple mystery.