kw: book reviews, fiction, humor
A favorite character of my childhood, first in stories, then in film, was the absent-minded professor. The inventor of Flubber is but one of a number of these archetypical bumblers.
In At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Alexander McCall Smith has gone the genre one better with Professor Dr. von Igelfeld, a truly blinkered, clueless academic, famous among a handful of philologists for his 1,200-page tome, Portuguese Irregular Verbs (the title of the first von Igelfeld "entertainment" by Smith).
Author Smith wrote in the voice of his native Botswana to bring us Precious Ramotswe and the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. With the good German Professor, the voice is a combination of erudite wit among mutually suspicious academics, and an exaggerated ivory-tower species of tunnel vision.
Dr. von Igelfeld, suffering the intrigues of his fellows, finds the intrigue even deeper at Cambridge on a visit there. Intrigue hardly begins to describe the thunderously funny convolutions of the plot in Bogotá, Colombia, where he is tricked into becoming President, and needs all his cleverness to abdicate before being shot by the next Government, due "any week now."
Ya want escape? None better than right here!
I really enjoy your blog! Polymath is one of my favorite words, and I find it an appropriate description for the author of these various posts. I just wrote a review of At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances on my blog, as well. Have you read the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series? What do you think of the representation of Christianity, particularly in In the Company of Cheerful Ladies?
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