Short Takes July 2025

Introducing Short Takes

There are so many things I want to write to you all about, and I never seem to have time. So, I decided I would start “Short Takes” to tell you, in 500 words or less, about a book, a show, a movie, or something else that moves me.  So here we go!

Film:

One Hundred Years of Solitude.  A beloved book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, made into an impressive Netflix series. I was transported into the world of Macondo and seven generations of the family of Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, their lives and love through peace and war. I highly recommend watching it in the original Spanish, with English subtitles. Mind you, I do not speak or understand much Spanish, but the sound of the characters speaking Spanish as originally written is wonderful, and far more immersive. I feel this way about shows or films in other languages as well. For example, I loved watching Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a show about the first autistic attorney in Seoul, Korea, in the original Korean with English subtitles. Brilliant series!

Casablanca. The Stanford Theatre Stanford Theatre Movie Guide, a local treasure in Palo Alto is playing many classic films during their Summer Film Festival.  I watched Casablanca in July. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman lit up the screen as we watched wide-eyed. Thrilling, moving, heartbreaking! As Time Went By, it became apparent it’s still the same old story, a flight for love and glory. :-) Next week, you can watch “Gone with the Wind”, and in the next several weeks, A Tale of Two Cities, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane among others. So round up the usual suspects, and head on over, and it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship with the iconic Stanford Theatre.

Books in Translation:

Pather Panchali, 2019 translation by Rimi

Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) written in 1929 by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay has been most recently translated from Bengali into English by Rimi in contemporary, engaging language. (Penguin Modern Classic, 2019. Priyanka Nandy). The first English translation of Pather Panchali was in 1968 by T.W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji. In translating the story of Opu, his sister Durga and their parents Horihor Roy and Shorbojoya, Clark-Mukherjee made the decision to end the translation when the Roys left the Abode of Contentment (Nischindipur) to go to Kashi. This is where Satyajit Ray, too, ends the first film of his immortal Apu Trilogy. However, that is not where Bibhutibhushan ended the book. To her great credit, Rimi has preserved the author’s intent, and the translation ends where the author ended his book. A lovely story which captures the wonder of Opu and Durga growing up in the countryside, and the author’s tenderness and compassion for his characters, flaws and all. On other translations, I notice on my bookshelf The Picador Book of Modern English Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. In it, he has translated three sections of Pather Panchali, around 10 pages.

Social media discoveries:

The Great Gatsby. A few months ago, I read an intriguing post on Black Twitter by Michael Harriot, writer and self-proclaimed “wypipologist”. “On April 10 1925, a young writer published his 3rd novel – a commercial disappointment about a man passing for white. 100 yrs later, Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Lowery reveals the century-old secret hidden in that literary masterpiece: "The Great Gatsby." I read a linked essay: Gatsby’s Secret - by Wesley Lowery - ContrabandCamp, and was gobsmacked!

I didn't care for The Great Gatsby, despite loving Fitzgerald's writing – it never quite resonated with me. But this insight! It made me sit right up, and now I want to re-read the book viewing Gatsby as white-passing. It could explain why so little is known about him, his past. Fascinating!