Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Max Rodenbeck, The Economist's chief Middle East correspondent since 2000, recently wrote a special report on Egypt, "The long wait", in which he argues that after three decades of economic progress and political paralysis, change is in the air. He answers some questions about the best books on the subject (for The Economist online), conceding that "Mubarak’s Egypt is just not as inspiring as, say, Cleopatra’s, and the literature reflects this."

These are my favourite answers:  read more »

Despite the latest eulogy from a prominent critic, there isn't much debate over whether fiction will survive. Of course it will—it has and it will. And if Gary Shteyngart is any indication, fiction will continue to be the place where authors ponder the survival of most everything else that matters. Shteyngart is a humorist whose novels mix timeless eastern-European dread with a more contemporary sense of absurdity. To help promote his new book, "Super Sad True Love Story" (whose trailer we recently heralded), he recently delivered a one-two punch in the New York Times, first in an interview with Deborah Solomon in the magazine, and then on the back page of the Sunday Book Review with an essay, "Only Disconnect", about the perils of connectivity. "With each passing year, scientists estimate that I lose between 6 and 8 percent of my humanity," Shteyngart writes.  read more »

If the idea of a trilogy offers authors an organising principle and a formal constraint, it offers readers the reassuring promise of more where the first book came from. Vendela Vida’s trilogy began in 2003 with “And Now You Can Go”, a starkly witty exploration of a young woman’s travels after a trauma, and continued with “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” (2007), whose young heroine unravels the question of her parentage over the course of a journey in far north Lapland. Vida’s newest offering, “The Lovers”, concludes the series by entering the consciousness of an older and decidedly wiser (though no less adrift) presence. The novel concerns a widow, Yvonne, who returns to the scene of her honeymoon and discovers, in the gently decomposing old town, several new ways of thinking about her marriage and herself, not all of them a comfort.

Vida, who is also a founding co-editor at the Believer, spoke with More Intelligent Life about “The Lovers”.  read more »

There are moments when an event will entirely dislocate what came before it and what comes next. Individual experiences momentarily coalesce, investing that moment with the potential to explore the human condition. From Samuel Coleridge to Ian McEwan, writers have long been fascinated by such ruptures.

“The Slap” begins with such a moment, when a man hits a child at a barbeque on a late summer afternoon in Melbourne. This slap reverberates, to varying degrees, through the lives of eight of the partygoers. Using these characters, Christos Tsiolkas explores themes of gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity in painful detail. From Hector, whose pride and physical beauty belie emotional vulnerability, to Rosie, whose terrible marriage and obsession with her child leads her on a martyr’s search for retribution, and Marios, an ageing first-generation Greek Australian, hindered in his expression of emotion by tradition. This is muscular, straightforward writing, and the men and women whose lives we follow provide compelling studies in human frailty. No wonder the judges of the Man Booker prize were so taken with it.

Mr Tsiolkas, himself a Melbourne local, conjures up a city of never-ending suburbs and carefully tended veggie patches, of houses that are full of the smell of garlic and lemon juice and Indian spices. The white Australians that feature in "The Slap" are often the outsiders in this new Australian’s Australia.  read more »

Penguin’s Central European Classics showcase brilliant prose from an era blighted by Soviet control. Slawomir Mrozek, famous in Poland for his glasses, also has a unique eye. His first story collection, "The Elephant" (1957, translated 2010 by Konrad Syrop), distils the absurd realities of his time.

An ideal foil to Solzhenitsyn’s forensic tomes, these three-page tales mix paranoia with oblique plotting and mordant wit. A man finds a torpedo in his coffee, and the authorities respond by introducing straws. Justice is arbitrary—a cat is arrested even though it has ID, as that alone arouses “justified suspicion”—but Mrozek doesn’t spare anyone. A woman rushes to a confessional on finding her husband of seven years is made of plasticine. When the priest proposes an annulment, she shrieks “Father, that’s impossible—we have children!” So Mrozek lays bare civilian gullibility, the church’s impotence and the malleability of Poland’s men. His matter-of-fact tone mocks the blind faith of his own generation and finds little hope for the next. Best of all is the title story, which rivals Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de suif” in its devastating brevity.

"The Elephant" (Penguin) by Slawomir Mrozek, translated by Konrad Syrop, paperback, out now  read more »

Because the world needs more voices, or, rather, more thoughtful, rarified ones that can be imagined with a British lilt, The Economist has just launched "Prospero", a new blog named for the hero of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", an expert in the power of books and the arts (ie, he was more or less undone by them). The blog will be full of literary insight, cultural commentary and coverage of the art market.

Already readers can find the paper's take on the Man Booker prize longlist (announced today, and full of impressive young writers, as predicted), and on Andrew Wylie’s new deal with Amazon to publish electronic versions of books by some of his authors (seen by some traditional publishers as a declaration of war). There are also quite a few posts that should look familiar to readers of More Intelligent Life because, frankly, we're one big happy family over here at The Economist's culture desk.

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (via Flickr)

"I am a person who routinely writes lists of things I've already done, just to make myself feel more accomplished," writes Catherine Price in the introduction to her new book. Ah yes, we all know the type. Price is the consumer to whom guides like "100 Places to See in Your Lifetime" and "1,000 Places to See Before You Die" are marketed: a compulsive list-maker, an organiser, an ambitious gatherer of experiences. So it makes some sense that Price, a contributing editor at Popular Science, would take hold of this imperative device and subvert it, as she does in her new anti-manual, "101 Places Not To See Before You Die".

The concept is simple: pick 101 terrible places or situations, explore them and live to tell the tale. The table of contents reveal the creative leeway within these confines, with chapters devoted to everything from a Chinese coal mine to a vomitorium to "Amateur Night at a Shooting Range" and "An AA Meeting When You're Drunk". Clearly, the concept contains a multitude, and Price's choices range from the psychologically humiliating to the sexually discomfiting to the physically painful. The entries themselves are short, sweet and sometimes entirely imagined for comic effect (as in the case of "The Room Where SPAM Subject Lines Are Created").

In a chapter devoted to nyotaimori, or "female body presentation", Price explains the technicalities of a practice known to laypeople as "Naked Sushi":  read more »

Given that Mary Roach has written about sex, cadavers, leeches and the human soul, it should come as no surprise that her forthcoming book, "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void", addresses such phenomena as “fecal popcorning”, weightless burping, and the exigencies of puking in your helmet during a spacewalk. Her newest endeavour is an exploration of the human relationship with outer space. It takes the author on a shiver-inducing tour through simulation facilities, isolation chambers and NASA research centres, where she asks the questions a layperson might be too embarrassed to articulate. The book that results is a space manual filtered through the lens of Roach’s ingenious reporting and wry humour. Herewith, five things More Intelligent Life learned along the way: