Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

January 28, 2013
Prolific serial novelist Smith (The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency) gently pokes fun at academia and its professoriate with this slapstick-y, deadpan-lite fourth installment of the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series. The socially inept Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is shocked when Professor Unterholzer, an oft- jealous rival who blames von Igelfeld for crippling his dachshund, is shortlisted for a prestigious, well-endowed prize. Believing a mistake has occurred, von Igelfeld makes an accusation of nepotism, sure that an unusual nose structure is proof of a familial connection. A hopeful romance with Frau Benz, a Schloss-owning heiress, grows tenuous as a result of an embarrassing faux pas; although Smith slyly allows von Igelfeld's moth-ravaged suit and scissor-cut sleeves to pass for curious and endearing. The professor is hoodwinked by students he chaperones to a Bavarian retreat and, later, when he slips and has a near-death plunge of three thousand feet off an Alpine summit, he is ironically hailed "an unlikely hero," resulting in tabloid-style fame. Von Igelfeld's foibles are many and his misfortunes ridiculousâtrying to help at a dinner party leads to a messy encounter with olive oil and a lame dachshundâyet Smith makes him dignified and subtle, a cleverly scripted sympathetic hero.

November 15, 2012
Prolific McCall Smith, who's unaccountably neglected Professor Dr. Dr. (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld ever since the trilogy that ended with At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances (2004), presents five more adventures for the eminent but clueless philologist. "Adventures" is a relative term, for von Igelfeld's life, like Kant's, is so regulated that the slightest departure from his normal routine or the comfort zone circumscribed by his advanced but recondite knowledge of Portuguese irregular verbs can be traumatic. Merely reading over an announcement that Professor Dr. Dr. Detlev-Amadeus Unterholzer, his incomparably less-celebrated colleague in Regensburg's Institute of Romance Philology, has been shortlisted for an award is enough to launch him in an unaccustomed direction--this time to Berlin, where he asks the Director of the Leonhardt Stiftung as delicately as he can whether there might possibly have been some mistake among the nominating committee. Subsequent episodes bring von Igelfeld together with Kitty Benz, the well-heeled widow to whom his colleague Professor Dr. Dr. Florianus Prinzel and his wife, Ophelia, are bent on introducing him, and then to an intimate lunch with Frau Benz at Schloss Dunkelberg, the modest home that features a ceiling painted with a scene depicting her late husband's entrance to heaven. Although this episode (spoiler alert) leaves von Igelfeld as unmarried as ever, he undergoes a different and utterly unexpected sort of change when he takes a group of graduate students on a study trip to an Alpine retreat--an experience that makes him a celebrity invited to give an after-dinner talk to a gathering of Hamburg businessmen in the final (for now) story. Gently but invincibly obtuse, von Igelfeld is too much an elephantine cartoon to inspire the love readers have given Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie.

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November 1, 2012
McCall Smith excels at creating comic characters: Bruce, the scented-haired narcissist of the Scotland Street series, for example, or Grace Makutsi, who scored the highest at the Botswana Secretarial College exams, of No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. McCall Smith's least well-known series, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, is also filled with comic characters, all academics of a particularly stripeGerman philologists who can trace word origins back thousands of years but, many times, cannot parse the simple meaning of what's going on. The hero (to himself, at least) is Professor Dr. von Igelfeld, whose quest for recognition and whose utter haplessness in dealing with the real world form the comic spine of the novels. In the fourth in the series, von Igelfeld's greatest rival has been short-listed for an academic prize that von Igelfeld believes should have gone to him. McCall Smith has the same gift that John Mortimer has in making boring conversations hilariousthe atmosphere in the Institute of Romance Philology's coffee room is very like the one-upmanship and backbiting in Horace Rumpole's chambers. Academia can be a hoot, and this series proves it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)