TILL DEATH DO US PART By Mahasweta Devi(Seagull, Rs 150) Mahasweta Devi's Till Death Do Us Part is a slim collection of tales, each of them focusing on a woman who is marginal to society. The lives of these women are narrated around a single event or transformation, and they are also seen within a crucial relationship - with a husband, lover, son or friend. Deftly woven in are various social and historical realities - caste, the Partition, Muslim divorce law - none of which feels like an extraneous 'issue' whose implications are being explored programmatically. These are all beautiful, moving stories, translated with restraint by Vikram Iyengar. They range across a wide span of the writer's career, from the early Sixties to the mid-Nineties. Perhaps the most memorable are 'The Saga of Kagaboga' and 'Talaq', both of which explore the inexplicable survival of long companionships in the face of personal eccentricity and severe hardship. BRANCH LINE TO ETERNITY By Bill Aitken (Penguin, Rs 295) By Bill Aitken's Branch Line To Eternity is a naturalized Indian's rather devout elegy to steam engines. Aitken's Scottish roots come through in the distinctive flavour of his humour. Dame Clara Cluck, Waltzing Matilda, Belle of Hell and the Swiss Miss are some of the stars in this delightful romance, and Viswakarma, the god of mechanical inspiration, its presiding genius. Travelling the length and breadth of the country over several years, Aitken seeks to 'catch the mood of these game old ladies smoking hard on the run as the steam age drew to a close, as well as indicate the strange elation that even the most superannuated of branch line locos released when there is fire in her belly.' THE CAMBRIDGE FACTFINDER Edited By David Crystal (Cambridge, Rs 350) David Crystal's The Cambridge Factfinder is the updated, revised and expanded fourth edition of an immensely valuable and useful reference guide. Organized into thematic sections which cover everything from science and technology through sports and games to religion and mythology, with a thorough summary of statistics relating to countries of the world, the economy, communications and world history, the book provides accurate answers to the widest possible range of questions. It also raises larger philosophical questions - what is a fact, and what isn't a fact? The word, 'fact', has one of the longest definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, according to which 'a datum of experience' is a fact, but not 'the conclusions which may be based upon it'. SIMPLIFICATIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM By Aniket Jaaware (Orient Longman, Rs 405) Aniket Jaaware's Simplifications: An Introduction To Structuralism And Post-Structuralism attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of post-Sixties Western literary theory. Jaaware runs through the key theorists from Saussure to Derrida, and also tries to give a sense of their philosophical underpinnings in the ideas of such figures as Hegel, Kant, Heidegger and Freud. He also illustrates the application of these theoretical approaches to a range of texts from Hamlet to Dalit literature. This book could have been less than half its size, had the author restrained his urge to hold forth. From the 'polemical introduction' to the final chapter of 'quotations, some obvious, some curious, some merely verbose' Jaaware's copia is the one serious obstacle to his project of 'simplification'. It also makes one wonder about his claim that post-structuralism is dominant 'only within a certain group of Eur-American [sic] academics'. The bibliography is also extensive, and there are some interesting, and possibly useful, chronologies and genealogical diagrams. SKIN By Margaret Mascarenhas (Penguin, Rs 250) Margaret Mascarenha'Skin reads like a parody of a magic realist novel, written by 'a culture-crossed mongrel of history'. Pagan Miranda Flores leaves California for Portuguese India, where her grandmother, Dona Gabriela, lies dying. And then her old ayah, Esperança, begins to tell her about the history of her family. 'You see, there were stories within stories, myths, dreams, legends, skeletons in closets. Mothers and fathers who weren't. Green-eyed girls and cases of mistaken identity. A melting pot of histories, races, religions. People who owned other people. Points of view. Acts of courage, cowardice, deceit. And love - the heart of the matter. Hearts that mattered, shattered, scattered. Like shards from a broken mirror.'