"surface reality" is a valid phrase in written English.
It generally refers to the physical or visible aspects of reality, as opposed to deeper or underlying truths. Example: "On the surface reality, everything seemed perfect in her life, but underneath, she was struggling with anxiety and self-doubt."
Kokoschka is not remotely concerned with giving any sign or resemblance of surface reality whatsoever.
Both the novel's surface reality and its structure suggest there will always be casualties in what we can see, unplugged gaps, and that life will roll on when our attention is elsewhere.
And the intent of its creators is to turn the inside out, obscuring the humdrum surface reality of our lives and placing our roiling, incoherent private terrors on display.
Somehow, Pamela Moller Kareman, the director, convinces us that Ms. Howe has succeeded in her search for a new fusion between the impossibilities of dealing with surface reality and the need to fulfill a higher ideal.
After returning from his trips abroad, Richard Villarroel, who underground had feared that his unborn son would be fated to a fatherless life, faced a surface reality in which he wasn't the father he'd hoped to be.
"Did you speak to me last night?" Andersson asks Ullmann the next morning, in a scene obviously intended to be closer to surface reality than the mysteries of the night before.
I started to grow more curious about the economic forces behind the surface realities of life.
As he explained at the time, "The world of surface realities is no longer paintable, for nothing is as it formerly seemed".
At its best, their production offers a vivid physical equivalent to Hemingway's stark prose style: detailed descriptions paint pictures of surface realities while hinting at hidden emotional stresses.
Like Ives and many literary chroniclers of the time, Mr. Feld is after not just surface realities like the parades and idealized pretty girls of small-town America in the first half of the 20th century but also the unacknowledged, sometimes tormented emotions that lay below the surface.
His idolaters praise him as one of the great polymaths of the 20th century, a courageous avatar who maneuvered his way through both the excitement and glitter of les années folles, never hid his homosexuality (even while promoting his efforts a dalliance with exiled princesses), and challenged conventional surface realities.
