Relationships that reflect the American reality
Santosh K. Bhatia
Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships
by Rana Nayar. Prestige Books, 2003. Pages 256. Rs 500.
Offering an incisive and insightful analysis of Edward Albee’s plays, Rana Nayar comes close to truth when he says that the book is "not just another addition to the growing corpus of Albee criticism." In the course of a career spanning more than four decades, Albee has written about two dozen plays and earned for himself a comfortable position in the firmament of American drama.

Looking back at the Holocaust with horror
Vikramdeep Johal
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald. Translated from German by Anthea Bell. Penguin Books. Pages 415. A34.50
A man watches a Nazi film shot in a Jewish ghetto, straining to spot his mother among the fleeting faces. Having last seen her several decades ago, when he was a child, he has only a dim memory of her. When the effort proves futile, he gets a slow-motion copy of the film made, hoping to see things more clearly.

Meet the author
“My book is a quest for the true as opposed to the mythical Tibet”
Humra Quraishi
PATRICK French, a 36-year-old British writer, has been travelling in India and is, at present, in New Delhi for the launch of his latest book Tibet, Tibet (Harper Collins). He is the author of Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division, for which he won the Sunday Times’ Young Writer of the Year Award, and Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize.

Bookmark
Second attempts tell a dismal tale
Suresh Kohli
MANJU Kapur is receiving considerable flak for her second novel, A Married Woman. Personally, one hadn’t thought much of her first one, Difficult Daughters either. But she is not the only one who hasn’t been able to keep up the promise of first success. Not that she is in any august company. One wonders why the second books of many of those, especially Indian English writers, who seemingly hit the jackpot with the first is a let down, if not a disaster.

Short takes
The softer pains of Partition
Jaswant Singh
The Luminous Circle
by Surinder K. Dutta. Minerva Press, New Delhi. Pages 262. Rs 450.
THE blurb of this work of fiction mentions the woes of the country’s partition. But the first reference to Partition comes somewhere in the middle of the book. Written nearly half a century after the event, it sensibly skips the horrors, which the writers of those days have dealt with adequately.

Urbanisation and its problems
P. K. Vasudeva
Urban Poverty and Urbanization
by Reena Bhasin. Deep and Deep Publications, New Delhi.
Pages 435. Rs 900.
URBANISATION is considered to be the sine qua non of economic development. It has been seen that the pace of urbanisation in developing countries like India has been dramatic. In 1973-74, the urban population was 60 million. It increased to 64.6 million in 1977-78, 70.9m in 1983-84, 75.2m in 1987-88, 76.3m in 1993-94, and in 1999-2000 it had risen to 77.2m. The growth rate of urban population is due to the large-scale shifting of rural population to urban areas.