The Portuguese Irregular Verbs Trilogy by Alexander McCall Smith

The Portuguese Irregular Verbs Trilogy by Alexander McCall Smith

Portuguese Irregular Verbs (1997) 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. Two sequels followed: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, both published in 2003. A fourth volume, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil, was published in 2011.

The protagonist is a troubled 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 (honoris causa) Florianus Prinzel and Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Von Igelfeld is plagued by envy and suspicion of them. The first book's title refers eponymously to von Igelfeld's magnum opus, an enormous tome of approximately 1200 pages (which sells poorly). 

I love McCall Smith and think that the first 3 books are legend status (I borrowed from the library and read all three during the Sept/Oct 2015 period but I haven't sourced the fourth one yet). 

You can't put them down once you start and you just laugh and laugh at all the quirky situations into which von Igelfeld finds himself.

My two most memorable sections (from the many) are

a) von Igenfeld having to give his Sausage Dog lecture in America
b) his adventures in Oxford and his gradually unfolding understanding of the many strange English customs.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs (1997)
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (2003)
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances (2003)
Unusual Uses for Olive Oil (2011)