Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a short comic novel by Alexander McCall Smith, and the first of McCall Smith's series of novels featuring Professor Dr von Igelfeld. It was first published in 1997. Some consider the book to be a series of connected short stories. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a pompous professor of Romance languages, graduates from college, and works hard to write a tome on Portuguese irregular verbs, his claim to academic fame. He talks and talks about it at conferences, usually attending with his two closest colleagues. They encounter the world outside academia with entertaining clumsiness. One review says the main character is "a gentle figure who deserves every cartoon anvil that falls on his head", in the humorous tradition of fictional characters Mr. Samuel Pickwick (in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens), Bouvard and Pécuchet (in an unfinished work by Gustave Flaubert), and Mr Pooter of Diary of a Nobody. Another reviewer considers the book to be a series of connected short stories, "gentle farces", "where much is made of nothing -- to great comic effect." That reviewer likens the stories to E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia books. Source: Wikipedia (en)