Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a pompous professor of Romance languages, works hard to write a tome on Portuguese irregular verbs, his claim to academic fame.

German professor Moritz-Maria 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Kirkus Reviews enjoys this lovable anithero who is "as predictable in his habits and as impervious to the outside world as Kant", following a great tradition: “All I want is love,” dolefully reflects the author of that standard but slow-selling reference work, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, “and a tiny bit of recognition from the Portuguese.” What he gets instead is a series of eight little adventures that add up to a life of quiet desperation.

Supported by his colleagues, the unfortunately named Prof. Dr. Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer and Prof. Dr. Dr. (honoris causa) Florianus Prinzel, who looks like an athlete but isn’t, he plays tennis after spending an hour with a rulebook, recalls a foreshortened duel that ended with a foreshortened nose, attempts to disprove a xenophobic Sienese landlady’s claims that Germans eat too much, falls in love with his dentist, and turns himself radioactive.

Trudging stoutly from one academic conference to the next, von Igelfeld recalls the great 19th-century comedies of minutiae inflated to monstrous proportions, though he’s less majestic than Mr. Pickwick and less fiercely stupid than Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Perhaps the closest analogy is Mr. Pooter, the office drudge of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, whose indulgently satiric tone Smith faithfully reproduces.Like these lovable antiheroes of the past, von Igelfeld remains a gentle figure who deserves every cartoon anvil that falls on his head but retains his dignity and goodness throughout.

The "comic vignettes based on the classic form of minutiae inflated to monstrous proportions," but the reviewer expects these stories are not as charming as those in the series set in Gaborone.

[5] She remarks that "The stories that make up the von Igelfeld trilogy are rooted in McCall Smith's own career in academia as a professor of medical law."

She credits the success of the novel to the author's "charming, gentle voice" which is "always clear and present, brimming with intelligence and humour and rooted in curiosity, one that elevates even the most innocuous interactions to both high comedy and art.

"[5] Per Dawn Drzal, "the book began as a private joke with a very distinguished real-life German professor, McCall Smith's friend Reinhard Dr. Dr. Dr. Zimmermann.

)"[2] Zimmerman bought half of the print run of 500 books, and slowly it built a cult following ("a kind of samizdat"[2]), which increased with each successive novel of the three.

"[2] 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.