Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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Literary journalists and researchers introduce current new publications; reading samples allow for a closer look at the texts; short portraits of the authors complement the picture.

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The Project "Incentives" targets at the internationalization of Austrian literature, respectively the translation of current texts.

Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

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[ book tip by Incentives ] A death takes Sissi Fux back to the Sausal region in the south of Styria. Back to her unloved relatives and the evil grandmother. Back to the father, who fell down a staircase and broke his neck. The father was an outsider in the village, the opposite of the inhabitants of the village with their affected piety and xenophobia: an idler and an alcoholic. Sissi works as a specialist in forensic medicine in Vienna, and even before the funeral she experiences everything she fled from: malice, opinionatedness, bigotry. Then, during the burial, a flash of lightning strikes the congregation of such hypocritical mourners, and Stefan König, the local doctor, arrives on the scene immediately to take care of the injured.

Sissi, Stefan and his wife Regina used to be an inseparable threesome. For about two years she has been missing, ever since a holiday on the island of Procida. Lilian Faschinger has Sissi Fux keep on returning to the Sausal, for more than half a year. Her relationship with Stefan becomes more and more intense. Then Sissi decides to travel to Procida by herself, on the trail of Regina. There she comes into possession of a USB stick on which Regina had been storing her diary entries for years on end. Reading it turns a lot of things upside down, if not everything into its opposite: Regina only pretended to like Sissi, manipulated her environment and systematically deceived her husband. Then in winter the chance discovery of a corpse in a lake in a nearby wood leads to a rapidly developing, life-threatening situation for Sissi.

Die Unzertrennlichen (The Inseparable Ones) is partly a grotesquerie, partly a love story painted over a criminological undercoat, a book in which Lillian Faschinger consciously ignores the usual rules of genre. At the same time it is a novel about disappearing and finding oneself. This is because Sissi Fux, who has grown up without a mother in structures which she rejected from childhood on, is at odds with herself. As regards sex, emotions, geography (Vienna is for her, according to one passage, not a home, just about a place to stay so she can practise her profession). Motifs which are employed to artistic effect include handicaps, damaged legs and feet, deafness and alertness, shimmering pigments of reality and structures of prejudice.

Abridged version of the review by Alexander Kluy, 4 Oktober 2012
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=9658

[ book info ] Faschinger, Lilian: Die Unzertrennlichen. (original language: German) Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 2012 . ISBN: 978-3-552-05577-3.