Avant garde Amazons and cooks

Women (Rupa, Rs 395) by Philippe Sollers is part of the series of more or less avant garde French texts being reprinted by Rupa in English translation. Femmes was brought out by Gallimard in 1983 and this is Barbara Bray?s 1990 translation. It is a tediously clever, datedly postmodern, French-leftish-intellectual send-up of feminism and misogyny ? Goddard on a bad day ? with Eight and a Half thrown in for good measure. It is fitfully funny, very long and highly self-indulgent. Will is an American libertinist/nihilist, journalist-turned-avant-garde novelist. He is confronted with a league of feminist-extremists calling itself WOMANN ? World Organization for Male Annihilation and a New Natality ? dedicated to the total destruction of the Judaeo-Christian patriarchal tradition.

Monsoon diary (Penguin, Rs 295) by Shoba Narayan is a cook book mixed up with shreds of personal reminiscences around food. The dishes are fairly pedestrian ? fruit chaat, ghee, pav-vhaji, upma, yogurt. Whoever needs a recipe book, that too interspersed with predictable wistfulnesses, to make these things? This is apparently not a recipe book, but a ?food narrative?.

Son of the soil (Viva, Rs 395) by Nazrul Islam is the author?s own translation of his Bengali novel, Bhumiputra. The English version is quite a tome. The Bengali original had 69 chapters and this has 161. This is unfortunate, because it demands a kind of time and attention from the reader that he would be wiser to conserve.

Comic century: An unreliable history of the 20th century (Penguin, Rs 350) by Gautam Bhatia is a ?slightly askew? account of the last century. It is relentlessly clever, but seldom manages to rise above the undergraduate-rag level of humour. Bhatia is an architect who has written about Laurie Baker and the Punjabi Baroque and a Suffragettes, virginity tests, fascism, atomic energy, Nato, Watergate ? just about everything is tossed into this ragbag of attempted funniness. Vishwajyoti Ghosh?s illustrations exactly match the achievements of the text. ?A new bar called Adam?s Rib had just opened along the eastern commercial edge of Paradise and, with few choices of amusement, Adam sauntered in below the flashing neon sign.