Lilian FaschingerThe Austrian writer Lilian Faschinger is a prolific prose author, poet, and translator who, since her 1983 debut with a volume entitled “Selbstauslöser. Lyrik und Kurzprosa,” has produced three novels, two radio plays, two volumes of short stories, a volume of poetry, and eight translations, four of which she wrote in collaboration with her Graz colleague Thomas Priebsch.

Faschinger was born in 1950 in Tschöran, a small town in Carinthia, and studied English literature and history at the University of Graz, where she earned her doctorate in English literature. She first attracted the widespread attention of the literary world in 1985 when she read extracts of her novel Die neue Scheherazade to the Klagenfurt jury that determines the winner of the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize. At the end of this reading the judges awarded her with a travel scholarship and a publication contract with the List publishing house in Munich.

Die neue Scheherazade, which appeared in print in 1986, established the satiric, feminist tone that informs much of Faschinger’s later work. The heroine, Scheherazade Hedwig Moser, is the daughter of a Carinthian engineer father and a Persian mother who experiences first hand the prejudices that Austrian society brings to bear against women and against foreigners. To “save her life” -- or at least her integrity and inner freedom -- the heroine conjures up a series of erotic adventures in which she is romantically linked with the likes of the artist Christo, the singer Tom Waits, the Hopi Indian Tom, John Lennon’s fictional brother Andrew, Clint Eastwood and John Cassidy, and John the Baptist’s double. The settings of these tales vary as well, as the first-person narrator moves easily between New York, Paris, and Greece. Despite the variety of locales and lovers, the work is peppered with biting critiques of Austrian politics and policies of the Roman Catholic church, as it affirms female sensuality and an escape into fantasy as the only homeland available to the heroine’s rebellious spirit.

Faschinger’s next novel Lustspiel (1989) further develops the idea that women have a right to equality in love relationships. The satire here is darker, however, as the heroine’s memories of a broken marriage and of a painful relationship with a married man color her narrative. Again the heroine escapes into literature as she creates a fantasy of herself as a marathon runner who leaves behind her all who would restrict her freedom. And again the work is full of references to fairy tales, Hollywood films, song texts and children’s verses as the narrator creates for herself a world in which women are free to pursue their own sexual desires.

Faschinger’s next two collections of short stories adopt a more somber note, as, in the first, Frau mit drei Flugzeugen (1993), average people are presented whose very banality masks their frustrated longings, and in the second, Sprünge (1994), the protagonists of each of the three stories seek to escape their existential loneliness through suicide.
Faschinger’s most recent novel, Magdalena Sünderin (1995), represents a return to the Baroque fantasies of her earlier novels as a spirited heroine kidnaps a priest on Whit Sunday in order to confess to him that she has murdered seven men when none proved able to fulfill her longing for a lasting and satisfying relationship. A good deal of humor is provided by the kidnapped priest, who, over the course of the confession, succumbs to the charms of his kidnapper and is converted to her point of view. In this novel the heroine quite literally escapes from her would-be captors by riding off into the landscape on her motorcycle.

Faschinger typically incorporates into her works a rigorous critique of Austrian society and the institution of the Church, as viewed from a woman’s perspective. At the same time she portrays a variety of settings and nationalities in her works, suggesting that there is no country where a woman can find complete fulfillment of her dreams for an equal partnership and lasting sexual pleasure with a man. She is a master at creating unique voices for her disparate protagonists, and for working into her texts an encyclopedic range of allusions to characters and situations from high and low culture, from the Bible to Batman, from Dante to Dracula. Her translations of English-speaking authors include, among others, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Richard Stern, and Janet Frame and they, too, have won critical recognition and acclaim. She is the recipient of at least eight literary prizes. At present she is working on a new satirical novel to which she has given the tentative title Wiener Stimmen.

Beverley Driver Eddy