Zoran Drvenkar Du bist zu schnell (Moving Too Fast) Klett-Cotta, July 2003. 288 pp. ISBN 3-608-93623-8 When eighteen-year-old Val gets lost in Hamburg in the middle of a drugs binge, she sees the world slow down before her eyes. Then sinister figures come into her vision - the Fast Ones (Die Schnellen), who resist the time warp and move swiftly through the slow-motion world. Waking up after her descent, Val finds herself sectioned in a psychiatric hospital. But when her friends Asta and Jenni are brutally murdered, distinctions become blurred. Are the visions just part of Val's illness, or is she trespassing into the forbidden world of the Fast Ones? One thing is certain: every time Val and her friends try to find out who these mysterious figures are, someone gets hurt. The novel has three alternating narrators: Val herself, her boyfriend Marek, and Theo, the boyfriend of the mysteriously murdered Jenni. Together they tell a story that takes us from Val's first vision to Theo's murder. Val's version of events is the strangest, her tale modulating with her ever-changing drug regimen and her relapses into psychosis. But as Marek and Theo become caught up in her world, their version of events becomes strange and fantastical too. Each of the characters interprets the bizarre murders according to his or her own insecurities and needs. And as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that at least one of the characters must be lying -- and at least one must be involved in the murders. At the end of the book, when the mysterious Marek drives off to fake Val's suicide, we still aren't quite sure what has happened. With their youthful sense of ambiguity, the narrators of the story have slipped out of normal ways of seeing and understanding events. Anything could be true. It is no mean feat to give a convincing first person account of psychosis, and to pull the reader into the psychotic's world. Drvenkar's handling of the dreamlike, 'in-between' states of young adulthood and mental illness and his delicate language and imagery add up to an exceptional read.