Wednesday, August 04, 2004

I’m reading The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, first lovely book in a series about a lady detective in Botswana. It is so very African, naive, yet down to earth, and it is full of surprising little gems like this one:

Mma Ramotswe read the remainder of the letter, which as far as she could make out was meaningless jargon which the attorney had been taught at law school. They were impossible, these people; they had a few years of lectures at the University of Botswana and they set themselves up as experts on everything. What did they know of life? All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere, paid up. They won by attrition in most cases, but they themselves concluded it was skill. Few of them would survive in her profession, which required tact and perspicacity.

Tee hee.

Needless to say, the author, Alexander McCall Smith, besides being extremely skillful in his portrayal of his most captivating heroine, is also a law professor.