Lilian Faschinger

Background

Lilian Faschinger was born on April 29, 1950 in Tschöran, Karnten, Austria. She spent her childhood in provincial Austria.

Education

Lilian Faschinger studied English, Literature and History at the University of Graz from 1969 to 1975. In 1979 she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature. A high-school exchange year in Connecticut in 1969 (during which she acquired a US high-school diploma) cemented her love affair with the Anglophone world and its culture.

Career

While working at the University of Graz as a part-time lecturer in English, Faschinger also made a name for herself as a literary translator, in particular with a translation of Gertrude Stein's monumental experimental novel The Making of Americans, which garnered for Faschinger and her collaborator Thomas Priebsch the prestigious Austrian National Prize for Literary Translators. Lilian Faschinger has been a free-lance writer since 1992 and has received several prizes and grants for her work. Since publication of her first original book in 1983, she has penned four novels, a handful of plays, and several volumes of short stories and poetry. Her novels especially are characterized by imaginative construction, biting wit, and a challenging narrative style.

Best-known among Faschinger's oeuvre is her 1995 novel Magdalena the Sinner (Magdalena Sunderin). It tells the story of Magdalena, a feisty if breathtakingly naive young Austrian who embarks on a pan-European quest for true love and her own identity. Not only does every love affair turn sour, but her treatment at the hands of various men turns her into a serial murderess. The bulk of the novel comprises Magdalena's confession/life-story, as told to an Austrian country priest whom she has first kidnapped, gagged, and tied to a tree.

Also featured prominently in the interview is Faschinger's most recent novel, Vienna Passion (Wiener Passion, 1999). This work chronicles the trials and tribulations of Rosa, a Bohemian serving maid in fin de siecle Vienna. Interpolated is a story of our own times: an unlikely love affair between the Afro-American Magnolia, visiting Vienna to study for the role of Anna Freud in a musical, and her hypochondriac, mother-fixated singing teacher Josef. Further topics explored in the interview include Austrian identity, feminism, literary influences, identity through narrative, the picaresque, modes of women's oppression, writing as therapy and as survival, reader reactions, and Faschinger's current and future projects.

Achievements

• Lilian Faschinger is an internationally renowned author. Her 1995 novel Magdalena the Sinner (Magdalena Sunderin), which has been translated into sixteen languages so far (seventeen, if the United States and British English are counted separately!). She also holds a number of Literary Prizes and Awards.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Magdalena the Sinner

    (Written with pace, humor and startling literary allusion,...)

    1997
  • Magdalena Sünderin 1995
  • Die neue Scheherazade 1986
  • Paarweise. Acht Pariser Episoden 2002
  • Wiener Passion 1999
  • Frau mit drei Flugzeugen 1993
  • Stadt der Verlierer 2007
  • Woman with three aeroplanes 1998

Views

Lilian Faschinger has controversial feelings about her homeland Austria.

Quotations: "I don't feel at home anywhere. My options are to stay in my own country and to feel like a stranger, or to go abroad, where one is also a stranger, but where the feeling of alienation is not as painful because it is natural. And that is why I have sometimes preferred to live elsewhere. But since you ask me where I feel at home, I would say in writing. Through writing one can create or recover a home, and only when I'm writing do I truly feel at home."

"My attitude toward Austria is ambivalent. That country has its positive aspects, and when one has traveled as much as I have, one realizes that other nations have their own problems. I keep returning and now, after many years away, I am once again living in Austria."

Personality

Born and raised in postwar, provincial Austria, the young Lilian Faschinger was frustrated by the oppressive atmosphere, lingering fascist attitudes, and widespread discouragement of female self-expression in her homeland. Literature, both in English and in German, was a source of inspiration and escape for her.

Connections

collaborator:

Thomas Priebsch

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998