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Showing posts from December, 2016

"Roald Dahl's Esio Trot"

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Roald Dahl's Esio Trot  is a British comedy television film that was first broadcast as part of  BBC One 's 2014 Christmas programming. It is an adaptation of  Roald Dahl 's children's novel  Esio Trot  in which a retired bachelor falls in love with his neighbour, a widow, who keeps a tortoise as a companion after the death of her husband. A rare romance from the typically dark imagination of children’s book author Roald Dahl, “Esio Trot” spells more than just “tortoise” backwards, but an evening of warm-fuzzy feelings all around as  Dustin Hoffman ’s Mr. Hoppy devises an elaborate scheme to woo the chelonian-loving widow downstairs, as played by  Judi Dench . Commissioned as a New Year’s telepic for British TV, this delightful family offering is already making its way to homevideo in several European markets, but could potentially support a more substantial treatment Stateside, if someone were to shell out for theatrical (exec producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein boug

"Translator Translated" by Anita Desai

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Prema Joshi is a “prematurely aged” instructor of English literature at a girls’ college, “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about,” who sees a way out of her malaise when she unexpectedly gets a chance to translate into English a set of short stories written in one of India’s many regional languages. The focus here is the hierarchy that separates writer and translator, with the latter clearly in an inferior position and frustrated by it, and what happens when a translator violates that order. But Ms. Desai also uses the novella for satiric purposes, perhaps to exact vengeance on some literary nationalists in India; at one point Prema and her publisher attend a conference where they are hectored by “a pudgy man in a sweat-stained suit,” who imperiously demands to know, “What made you decide to translate these stories into a colonial language that was responsible for destroying the original language?” ... "Translator Transla

"First Darling of the Morning" by Thrity Umrigar

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First Darling of the Morning  is a series of glimpses into author Thrity Umrigar’s childhood, growing up in Bombay at a time when the country of India was still new and unstable. The stories start at a very young age with some of Umrigar’s earliest memories and continue until she is twenty years old and leaving India for the great uncertainty of the United States. This isn’t a solid memoir, though; there are gaps in between each story, sometimes of a few days, sometimes of a few years. It allows the author to pick and choose which of her memories she wants to share with the reader. Sometimes they are humorous and sometimes they are incredibly painful. Each is a part of a larger story: the tale of Umrigar’s coming of age in an uncertain time. Though  First Darling of the Morning  is a memoir, it reads like literary fiction. This is the perfect book for those people who want to read more nonfiction but have trouble with writing styles or pacing. The book itself is relatively short a