Portuguese Irregular Verbs (1997)

Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a short comic novel by Alexander McCall Smith, and the first of McCall Smith's series of novels featuring Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld. It was first published in 1997.

Von Igelfeld, a pompous German professor of Romance languages, works hard to write a tome on Portuguese irregular verbs, his claim to academic fame. He talks about it at conferences, usually attending with his two closest colleagues, professors Dr Dr Florianus Prinzel and Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. They encounter the world outside academia with entertaining clumsiness.

One review says the main character is "a gentle figure who deserves every cartoon anvil that falls on his head", in the humorous tradition of fictional characters Mr. Samuel Pickwick (in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens), Bouvard and Pécuchet (in an unfinished work by Gustave Flaubert), and Mr Pooter of Diary of a Nobody. Another reviewer considers the book to be a series of connected short stories, "gentle farces", "where much is made of nothing – to great comic effect." That reviewer likens the stories to E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia books.

Plot summary

Von Igelfeld feels that he is not accorded the scholarly recognition and veneration he deserves, though he has a good position as a philologist at the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany. He is plagued by envy and suspicion of his colleages, Prinzel and Unterholzer.

The book opens with the three professors attending a conference in Zürich, staying at a hotel out of town. Seeing a tennis court, they decide to play a game, getting equipment and an old book on the rules of tennis (written by a Cambridge graduate) from the hotel. After ten minutes of reading the book, they start the game, with two playing and the third as referee. None of them can serve, which sounded simple in the book. No-one can achieve the required number of sets to win. They give up playing, attributing their failure to have a winner to the Cambridge book, after providing excellent entertainment to others in the hotel with a view of the tennis courts.

Back when he was a student, von Igelfeld was at first interested in pursuing his doctoral studies in the old Irish language. He moves to Munich to work under an expert in Irish. They go on a field trip to Cork, where they are directed to an old Irish speaker, named Sean, who shouts at them until they leave. Von Igelfeld takes it down phonetically, and later learns that the vocabulary is all curse words. His landlady sees the page of Irish (translated into German) in his room and, thinking it is pornography, throws him out on the spot. He had already been considering irregular verbs as a topic of greater interest, so he parts from the unsupportive professor in Munich for the study of Romance languages at the university of Wiesbaden.

While at college, he commits his friend Prinzel to a duel, thinking him an athletic type of man. Prinzel is not athletic and rather upset. Duels are fashionable on the campus; von Igelfeld accepted the challenge from a group who are well practised at fencing. Prinzel loses the tip of his nose in the duel. The drunk surgeon who patches him up attaches the lost skin upside down. Von Igelfeld never again refers to his friend as an athlete.

Professor von Igelfeld's interest in, and extensive knowledge of, Romance languages take him abroad for conferences or vacations, where he finds adventure and mishap. He is invited to conferences because of the definitive book he researched and wrote, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, which sold about 200 copies to libraries, leaving several hundred of the original print run of this hefty tome.

Von Igelfeld sees a dentist for a troublesome tooth, deciding he will pursue her romantically. He gives Lisbetta, the dentist, a copy of his only book as a gift. She stands on the book to make it easier to care for her patients. He tells his colleague Unterholzer about this excellent new dentist. Unterholzer acts more quickly in courting Lisbetta, and the couple become engaged. Von Igelfeld endures the emotional challenge of attending their wedding.

He then takes a vacation to Venice in September with the Prinzels, where he learns that the Venetians are not fond of German tourists, as not enough of them have been visiting. Oddly, he chances upon a Geiger counter in their hotel. He finds no evidence of radiation on himself. When Florianus Prinzel tries the device, it reveals radioactivity on his shirt, where water had splashed on him in a gondola ride with his wife. Von Igelfeld shares the remarks made to him about a problem with the water in Venice, leading to a decline of German tourists in the summer. The courses of their meal were measured, leading them to send the fish course back to the kitchen. The three decide to end their stay in Venice early, so Prinzel can seek medical advice in Germany. Then young Tadeusz – a boy with a Polish family staying at the same hotel – walks past the measuring device, which reveals that he has a very high level of radiation. Von Igelfeld approaches the mother, speaking in French, telling her that her son has an issue with radioactivity. She replies politely, thanking him for the information, and indicating she has a theory about children and radioactivity, saying no more. Von Igelfeld receives a telegram from Unterholzer about an award from the Portuguese government. He is happy because he thinks the curtly worded telegram meant it was for himself. As they drive through Austria back home, Prinzel points out that Unterholzer probably meant the award was given to him, not to von Igelfeld. After a moment of sadness, he realizes this is not the end, and the three head back to Germany, "where they belong".

Characters

Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld: A tall German scholar of philology, who has specialized in Portuguese irregular verbs. He is about 35 years old in the last five chapters.