"'Tis is the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this "classless country, " and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports." "When Frank returns to America in 1953,...

Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology learns to play tennis and forces a college chum to enter into a duel that results in a nipped nose. He also takes a field trip to Ireland where he becomes acquainted with the rich world of archaic Irishisms, and he develops an aching ingatuation with a dentist fatale. Along the way, he takes two ill-fated Italian sojourns, the first merely uncomfortable, the second defintitely...