Product Description

Alexander McCall Smith, best-selling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has turned his hand to humour. The delightful result is a creation of comic genius. For in the unnaturally tall form of Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, we are invited to meet a memorable character whose sublime insouciance is a blend of the cultivated pomposity of Frasier Crane and of Inspecteur Clouseau's hapless gaucherie. Von Igelfeld inhabits the rarefied world of the Institute of Romance Philology at Regensburg, a world he shares with his equally tall and equally ridiculous colleagues, Professors Florianus Prinzel and Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Their unlikely adventures are described in three deliciously funny instalments: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128967 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-05
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 4
• Binding: Audio CD

Review
For The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency: 'A rare pleasure' Daily Telegraph 'Forget the library - the body is in the mud hut. An African Miss Marple created by a Scottish lawyer ... superb' Sunday Times 'One of the most entrancing literary treats of many a year' Wall Street Journal 'A strong, independent, and endearing model for contemporary women anywhere ... A crowded fictional genre will have to make room for Precious Ramotswe. In the best sense possible, she's a heavyweight' Boston Globe

About the Author
Alexander McCall Smith is a Professor of Medical Law as well as the author of over 50 books from FORENSIC ASPECTS OF SLEEP to THE CRIMINAL LAW OF BOTSWANA, THE PERFECT HAMBURGER (for children) to PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS (short stories).

Customer Reviews

5 Stars Are Not Enough
This exquisite little book is the first of what one hopes will be many accounts of the doings (adventures is perhaps too exciting a word) of Herr Doctor Professor von Igelfeld.

McCall Smith pokes very gentle but pointed fun at, inter alia, academics, librarians, landladies and a certain sort of unselfconscious pomposity that protects the perpetrator from even noticing the damage he is wreaking. Think George Grossmith, P G Wodehouse, Inspector Clouseau or even Mr Bean!

If you have read "Death in Venice" the final story, in which the Professor, visiting Venice, finds himself attempting to avoid the attentions of a Polish teenager, is just too delicious for words!

Slim Pickings
I have read - and really enjoyed - the "No 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series, so I thought that I would branch out and see what McCall Smith's other novels were like.

I found this to be mildly amusing so long as you have some appreciation of academic jealousies and intrigues, but I thought that the whole area is covered much more amusingly and entertainly - as well as being better written - by David Lodge.

I was a bit dissappointed in the book.

Satires of German Academics
If you've ever been to Germany and been introduced to someone whose title was Professor Doctor Doctor Doctor and you were required not to smile as you listened to the introduction, this is your book. Academics in general take themselves too seriously, and Alexander McCall Smith draws on his years of experience in academia to lampoon the worst excesses.

The humor is rather broad and obvious, but it does hit the mark. Those who aren't exposed to academics may wonder what all of the fuss is about.

These are a series of eight stories about Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld (think hedgehog field) and his colleagues.

With enormous self-confidence, the three professors decide to learn tennis by reading a book in the Principles of Tennis.

Von Igelfeld launches his fellow student and future colleague into a dangerous form of sport with humorous and unexpected consequences in Duels, and How to Fight Them.

Early Irish Pornography shows the potential absurdity of studying just any old language if you are a philologist

Italian Matters explores the bases of national prejudices

Portuguese Irregular Verbs explores the immense over-investment that all authors have in their work

Holy Man explores how the rational man meets the mystic and what he makes of the experience

Dental Pain looks into professorial romantic ideas

Death in Venice tickles one's fancy with references to Thomas Mann.

If you like the Botswana stories, these stories will probably not appeal as much. There's bile and vague pity beneath the humor here rather than love for the characters.