AUNTIE POLDI

The Sicilian summer was bringing out the abs and pecs again. It would once more reduce all movements to the consistency of molasses while enervating people with the sirocco, plague the countryside with tiger mosqitoes and forest fires, and make people closet themselves behind their shutters more suspiciously than usual. But summer belongs to Sicily like mountains to Switzerland. It’s only during the long, hot months from May to October that the island is entirely at ease with itself, rediscovering its rhythm like a cat that has strayed and found its way home again. Summer would also bring mulberry granita, silken nights filled with promise and the scent of jasmine, and days bathed in the sand-coloured light of which you can never get enough. The coffee would again taste as it does nowhere else – in fact, everything would again taste like the very first time, for that is the Sicilian summer’s hypnotic trick; everything feels pristine, over and over again,

‘Auntie Poldi’ is Isolde Oberreiter, a 60ish Bavarian widow who retires to her late husband’s home town of Torre Archirafi in Sicily. She fully intends to to drink herself to death while taking in the glorious view. Fortunately, despite depression, sadness and excessive drinking, slowly but surely her formidable life force reasserts itself.  Instead she finds many, many reasons to stay this side of the grave. They include new friends, her husband’s family, the manly and attractive Commissario Vito Montana, plus wine, grappa, prosecco and solving crimes.

The plots are insanely complicated, as is Poldi herself. She’s lusty, bold, clever, crazy, annoying, changeable, ridiculous and adorable. She wears a huge black wig (and claims that Amy Winehouse borrowed her hairstyle), has a wardrobe full of incredible clothes and a thing for perving at traffic cops.

Sicily herself is quite a character as well. I loved the long, lush, lavish descriptions, the detours and digressions into Sicilian history, folklore,  food, crime (the mafia, of course), lifestyle and character.  Auntie Poldi’s adventures are narrated by her nephew, a stitched-up and timid would-be writer who travels from Munich each month to spend a week or two ‘keeping an eye’ on Poldi, working on his turgid family saga and inevitably getting caught up in Poldi’s schemes.

I’ve just read the first three  – Sicilian Lions, Fruits of the Lord and The Handsome Antonio –  in quick succession, and the bonkers plots have now amalgamated into a whirl of hair-raising sleuthing expeditons via Vespa involving mafiosi, real estate, pheromones, vineyards, decaying palazzo, ancient villages, psychics (a beautiful woman, an ugly man, a spooky child), a priest, a Finnish heavy metal band, a palm-tree growing magnate, corrupt practices in water supply, a quarry, several grisly murders, quite a lot of mature-aged sex and I can’t think what else but there’s LOTS.

Though I’ve got another one on the shelf, I need a little breather. One more book would be like having pasta al nero, spigole in agrodolce, pepata di cozze, lumache in salsa di pomodoro, calimaretti fritti, insalata di arance e finocchio selvatico, caponata siciliana, parmagiana alla Teresa, an expresso, half a dozen cannoli and a gelato al limone, all at the one sitting.

However (from the ridiculous to the sublime?) the Poldi books have given me a bit of a yen to re-read The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa…