SERIOUS By John McEnroe Little Brown, £ 17.99 In the history of modern tennis, John McEnroe is a legend. His play had the almost perfect mixture of power and touch. After retirement, he has, in recent times, become a very good commentator of the game. But as a writer, he will not qualify for the South Club Open. Even with the help of his ghost, James Kaplan, he touches in his autobiography almost incredible depths of trivia and banality. From a player of McEnroe's genius, there is always the expectation that he will add, through his knowledge and experience, to the understanding of the game. More technical insights are expected from him. But McEnroe provides bald summaries of matches. Take his handling of his matches against Bjorn Borg. These, in living memory, have acquired epic proportions. McEnroe offers no comments on the different styles of tennis played by the two of them. He offers no explanations for his initial defeats and his eventual victory. He repeats the scores, when whose service was broken and other details, which can be got from any record-keeper of tennis. Who wants to read McEnroe for such irrelevant nonsense? Readers want to know of his evaluation of Borg, his strengths, weaknesses, the shots in which he excelled. Only a McEnroe, if he put his mind to writing, can provide such insights. McEnroe, as commentator, has shown that he is actually capable of evaluating players, that he has a deep knowledge of the technical aspects of the game and that he was, behind his spoilt-brat image, a thinking and serious tennis player. McEnroe pretends to be serious here and fails. The out-of-court serious McEnroe is not a patch on the outrageous McEnroe, on court. This is a ghost of a great tennis player. No sex, we are scholars KAMSUTRA By Vatsyayana Mallanaga, Oxford, Rs 350 This is a new translation of a well-known classic. Reviled as pornography, read as erotica, the Kamasutra has come to be regarded as a major treatise on the social mores of ancient India. Two outstanding scholars have collaborated on the translation and the annotations of the text: Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar. The outcome of this collaboration, alas, is nothing to write home about. It is no better or no worse than other annotated translations of the famous manual of sex. Parts of the annotation/introduction smack of post-modern pompousness: 'Beneath the veneer of a sexual textbook, the Kamasutra resembles a work of dramatic fiction more than anything else.' Was it fiction then? Or was the text and the practices it described in detail anchored in some kind of social reality? The editors suggest, 'the text is like a drama because it is a fantasy'. To read Kamasutra as a fantasy is to vacate it of all significance. The text is too rich in social details to be relegated to the level of fantasy. One suspects that this is Kakar trying to be smart to gain access to a Western audience. This suspicion is strengthened by the explication to a Western audience of the erotic dimensions of betel (sic) in ancient India. This can only be understood by analogy 'with the overtones that champagne has in Europe, or the post-coital cigarette. It evokes the cigarette foreplay of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep or the cigarette sublimation shared by Bette Davis and Paul Heinreid in Now Voyager'. Does this analogy explain anything to anybody? And it is possible to have a more literal reading of those sequences, one that will not take the sexual symbolism suggested by the editors. The translation of Richard Burton was wrong-headed but it was not pompous. This translation is lucid, in modern English, but the introduction is enough to make one yawn. That's the last thing a reader of Kamasutra should do.