 Inventing Reality Review: Haute Surveillance Katlyn Slough Haute Surveillance Johannes Göransson Fiction Tarpaulin Sky Press, pp. 191 Cost: $16.00 Johannes Göransson’s second novel, Haute Surveillance, first introduces his nameless narrator in the midst of confusion: he immerses his readers in a world of grotesque and vivid imagery, of “a thousand mute actresses with their mouths full of jewelry,” of a “cutting room” that is “full of soldiers masturbating.” He places readers in his piecework of violence, sex, art and emotion, in short snapshots of unexplained events, and leaves them scrambling to find their way out. Readers get one companion, one true character: an unreliable, determined, and probably insane narrator, and the reader slowly realizes this world is the narrator’s own.
Göransson makes it clear from the very first page that the reality of the situation isn’t important, what is happening isn’t even important. The ideas are.
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 Humanity Behind the Wall Review: In Times of Fading Light Joseph F. Berenato In Times of Fading Light Eugen Ruge, Translated by Anthea Bell Fiction – Novel Graywolf Press, pp. 308 Cost: $26.00 My generation comprised the last of the Cold War Kids, and the Communist Bloc was still a very real thing during my childhood. It didn’t matter if we were talking about soldiers or scholars, presidents or peasants; any person beyond the Berlin Wall was the enemy. It was inconceivable to us that anyone who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain could be painted as anything but “Godless Communists”. Yet that is exactly what Eugen Ruge did in his out-of-the-gate hit In Times Of Fading Light, which spans almost sixty years of family and national history.
The story is not told linearly; instead, the narrative jumps back and forth in a series of vignettes starting and ending in 2001 just days after September 11, and going as far back as 1952 (the year that the German Democratic Republic – East Germany – closed its border to West Germany). By telling these tales through a multitude of characters’ points of view – one story in particular is told from six unique perspectives on October 1, 1989, slightly more than a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall – Ruge gives us an intimate look at characters who are every bit as hopeful, talented, jaded and flawed as their Western rivals.
The sonnet has been given new life. It mulls over existence in loneliness and in the dingy places, people, and pastimes we often overlook. In All of You on the Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert uses this traditional form as a vehicle to tackle the ancient question, what am I doing here? Sometimes the place is real, West Philadelphia or New York, but no matter the setting, the speaker has the same agenda: to observe, to pick apart, to make sense, to come to a conclusion about his surroundings. As humans and as thinkers, this is what we do, Hilbert suggests.
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