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The 2 ½ Pillars of Wisdom, Alexander McCall Smith
Abacus
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)
Readers of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency will be familiar with the author's gently satirical and puckish sense of humour. In the sternly Teutonic Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Iglefeld of the Institute of Romance Philology, McCall Smith has created a worthy rival to Mma Ramotswe.
Tall, pompous and ever mindful of his dignity, the professor constantly seeks recognition of his scholarship and the respect of his colleagues, especially Professor Dr Dr (sic) Florianus Prinzel and Professor Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. He regards the latter as very much his inferior, being short in stature and endowed with a particularly large nose.
Author of the mighty tome Portuguese Irregular Verbs, von Iglefeld (coat of arms a hedgehog recumbent) is from time to time invited to read papers at learned gatherings in other parts of the world. He is always trying to extricate himself from the difficult situations into which his unwitting social solecisms have landed him. A study of ancient Irish obscenities leads to his being accused of pornography and thrown out of a boarding house. A visit to Italy is ruined by his one-upmanship tussle with Signora Cossi, owner of the hotel in which he is staying, and where he suffers serious hunger pangs.
The second book in this trilogy is The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs. In a case of mistaken identity the professor attends a convention in Arkansas where he is horrified to find he is expected to deliver a lecture on veterinary medicine. The unexpected success of this occasion lands him in a worse dilemma at home when he is asked to perform an operation on a friend's sausage dog. A further disaster involves some sacred saint's bones with which von Igelfeld has been entrusted. Then he makes a monumental faux pas while studying in the Vatican library.
In At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, the professor spends a term at Cambridge University, where he is constantly confused by English understatement and irony, and becomes involved in academic intrigue. This, however, pales into insignificance when he becomes entangled with political plotting in Colombia, and briefly finds himself nominated president.
An entertaining and light-hearted read that I thoroughly enjoyed.