October 6, 2004
Not just one new series and not just two! The NYTimes reports that in December this delightful-book-generator-in-superhuman-volume will publish a novel that begins a series featuring "the pompous Prof. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany, the author of Portuguese Irregular Verbs and a man consumed by jealousy and suspicion."
Perhaps upstream of a swell of interest in the virtues of virtue, appearing in such new iterations as the John Templeton Foundation's In Character and, in its own small tangential way, this weblog, the characters
embody Mr. McCall Smith's interest in everyday moral and philosophical conundrums. / "I'm quite intrigued by how modern philosophers who are engaging with the world answer the question of how we should live," he said. "In my books I'm increasingly going to look at that question: how people resolve ordinary dilemmas and moral issues in their day-to-day life."
A professor of medical law, and a member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO, McCall Smith is not unfamiliar with the complexities and darknesses of modern life. However, his writing is not captive to those forces.
...Though he admires social realism in novels, he is not that sort of writer. / "If we take a hard-nosed look at the world, we could say, 'Well, it doesn't always work, and ultimately people will actually disappoint us,' " he said. "But the problem with that is that it isn't a particularly useful philosophy to get us through life. We can't necessarily answer the great questions about meaning - Camus talks about this, that you can't answer the question of what is the meaning of life, but you can find meaning in a limited context, and work toward that.'' / He continued, "There is a role for books that say to people that life is potentially amusing and that there are possibilities of goodness and kindness - that kindness needn't be dull, that it can also be elevating and moving."
Oh yes, the third treasure is a serial novel appearing every weekday in Edinburgh's own The Scotsman. The man wrote a book on Forensic Aspects of Sleep. Does he? Ever?
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