Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs Review

Overall Rating

Mildly humorous, some good points about the vanity of (some - or many?) in academic professions.

Some things are just not right, e.g. the order of German academic titles (it's "Professor Doktor", not the other way round), or the spelling of "Tadeusz".

Portuguese Irregular Verbs is quite an amusing book about Professor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld and his two academic colleagues who are, at times, his rivals. There are a number of observations about university life that are presented in a very funny way, e.g. the protagonist's obsession with the importance of his opus magnum, a heavy book on everything that can be said about the irregular verbs in Portuguese. How Von Igelfeld is worried about the fact that his book doesn't sell particularly well, how he tries to find out which of his colleagues has (or hasn't) bought a copy, how shocked he is by the publisher's suggestion to put the remaining stock to other, more profitable uses ... all this is really funny.
However, one has a feeling that such topics have been dealt with before, and even in a funnier way and in better style, by David Lodge ("Small World", for example).