Portuguese Irregular Verbs

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Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a short comic novel by Alexander McCall Smith, and the first of McCall Smith's Professor Dr von Igelfeld novels. It was first published in 1997.
The protagonist is a bitter German professor, Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, who feels that he is not accorded the scholarly recognition and veneration he deserves. Von Igelfeld is an extremely tall philologist at the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany. His closest peers at the institute are professors Dr Dr Florianus Prinzel and Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Von Igelfeld is plagued by envy and suspicion of them.
In Portuguese Irregular Verbs, von Igelfeld's interest in, and expansive knowledge of, Romance languages take him on junkets abroad, where he finds adventure and mishap. The book's title refers eponymously to von Igelfeld's magnum opus, an enormous tome of approximately 1200 pages.
Alexander McCall Smith followed Portuguese Irregular Verbs with two sequels: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, both published in 2003. In 2004, Abacus republished all three novels in a paperback omnibus titled The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom.