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Bibliofile

On dying French philosophy and the battle for the Bad Sex Award.

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Bibliofile
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French Misses

While Indian academics lap around in the cesspool of careerism, a Mauritius-born academic of Indian origin is creating waves with his searing critique of French intellectualism. Sudhir Hazare­esingh, 54, calls his book "an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people" but How the French Think (Allen Lane) is anything but. The Oxford political scientist says French philosophy, which contribu­ted to streams of thought such as rationalism, republicanism, feminism, positivism, existentialism and structuralism, is in the doldrums. The country, which gave thinkers and authors from Voltaire to Rousseau and Balzac to Camus, is no longer looked up to. The idea of a glo­bal French 'rayonnement' is now a distant, nostalgic memory, says Haz­are­e­singh. "The time will soon come when we will be reduced to selling little statues of Sartre made in China," he quotes a disillusioned writer as saying. Let the record show that a well-known Indian writer has named his dog ‘Foucault'.

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Grey-Green Whip

Move over Manil Suri, E.L. James is here. The author of the bonkbuster Fifty Shades of Grey is out with Grey, a fetter-fuck-and-flog tome written from the point of view of its leading man, and reviewers are falling over the turnstiles at James's imagination of what happens between the covers. The sado-masochistic novel is replete with hammish prose, but this one takes the nipple clamps: “My green car is fuzzy. Covered in grey fur and dirt. I want it back. But I can't reach it. I can never reach it. My green car is lost. Lost. And I can never play with it again." Try topping that, Aniruddha Bahal, winner of the 2003 Bad Sex Award.

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