From what I remember, it is. I read it very long ago as a kid, and I found it quite funny. Sort of a parody of popular adventure novels at that time (1930s), making fun of the usual tropes. Lot of things inspired by the writer’s own extensive travels in Western Europe and North Africa. It’s probably avaiable for pennies or free now.
Ivan Gorchev, sailor on the freight ship ‘Rangoon’, was not yet twenty-one when he won the Nobel Prize in physics. To win a scientific award at such a romantically young age is unprecedented, though some people might consider the means by which it was achieved a flaw. For Ivan Gorchev won the Nobel Prize in physics in a card game, called macao, from a Professor Bertinus, on whom the honour had been bestowed in Stockholm by the King of Sweden a few days earlier. But those who are always finding fault don’t like to face facts, and the fact of the matter is that Ivan Gorchev did win the Nobel Prize at the age of twenty-one.
Opening lines from the novel “The Fourteen-Carat Roadster” by Jenő Rejtő (P. Howard)
You’re right, OP is a 14 days old account with around 1200 posts, holy shit. Either a bot or a crazy person, I’m blocking them