Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a Tiny Bundle of Comedy and Oddity

Professor von Igelfed is a man who believes he does not get the respect he deserves. Through a series of short stories of occurences in the Professor's life, we explore different times that he thought something would go his way and it actually failing once again.

Von Igelfeld was very interestingly written. He is pretentious and self-absorbed, so he has trouble seeing the obvious things right in front of him.

Von Igelfeld had two main friends throughout the book and I loved the development of their relationship. There was something very realistic about it. I loved how von Igelfeld's self-centeredness came through in these relationships. It felt like he thought himself better than the other two, but he needed friends to not be lonely, so he stuck with them, or, at first with one of them, thought he could climb a little in society if he was with them. His personality was evident and I just loved how the author imcorporated it in the narration. It was a trully superb third person narration.

Rarely have I found myself laughing out loud at lines in a book before, even when something is humorous, but this book had some witty one-liners that completely cracked me up. Although the conclusion of most of the chapters is quite funny, the final two essays are particularly "laught-out-loud" funny. The witty lines are simple and hidden in the text, but extremely effective.

The pacing is my biggest problem with this book. For such a short read, it is surprisingly slow. A couple of the essays did not interest me very much, so I had a hard time getting through them; however, the very funny ones flew by pretty quickly. The pacing might just be a matter of what parts of the story you are most interested in.

This is by far one of the oddest books I have ever read, with its weird occuerences and character quirks. I do think its a fun bit of light reading that people who like witty and pretentious comedy will enjoy.