Lilian Faschinger

Magnolia Brown, a wannabe Shakespearean actress in New York, is convinced by her sleazy director to travel to Vienna for singing lessons, there prevailing for accommodation and introductions on a distant relative on her white, maternal side. Her father being African-American and leaving her with dark skin soon exposes her there to some of the more obvious expressions of present-day prejudice and xenophobia.

Also the relative she stays with is obsessed with tripe soup, her dolls, and show more everything being just so; and the singing teacher she gets introduced to is… I hesitate to say hypochondriac, as his various colds and flus and pneumonias certainly seem real enough, but they also seem very likely to be psychosomatic. To the extent they have a physical cause, they aren’t helped by the fact that his mother’s cure of choice for his illnesses was to play Schubert at them, so that he’s never really had a chance to be healthy.

I didn’t really like either of these characters a lot, though I could feel a certain distant empathy for both, so my reaction to them finding feelings for each other is an equally distant, “Oh well, good luck to them, I guess.”

What I did like was the the protagonist of the second timeframe, about 80 years before present, in the time of Empress Sisi. Rosa is the illegitimate daughter of a cook and her (married) employer, and tells (in a notebook Magnolia finds in her relative’s house) the tale of her journey to Vienna to seek her fortune as a servant, and how this turns out for her. We know from the start that how this turns out is she is executed for the murder of her husband, but the twists and turns along the way are engaging, and Rosa is as likeable as she is initially naive, so this narrative, interspersed with the present-day, for me rescues the rest of the novel.

But I also liked the structure and the contrasts between Vienna’s culture and its bigotry; between a morbidity that pervades both timelines, and the passions (both romantic and musical) that the title alludes to. show less

This much celebrated first novel by an Austrian writer is a strange dark tale. A young woman, Magdalena, has been disappointed in love. As she states:
"There is nothing more dangerous than a woman whose longing for love has been unremittingly disappointed. "
In fact, her relationships with men have been so devastating that she has had to kill most of them. In need of absolution (though she seems hardly repentant) she kidnaps a priest, ties him to a tree and begins her long tale of adventure show more and her search for true love.
Although the first 70 pages were a bit rough, once the story got moving, I found it quite a good read, even humorous. show less

Plot:
Magdalena has lived an eventful life and finds that it is time to confess. To make sure that she has the undivided attention, she decides the best way to do that is to simply abduct a priest. So she grabs priest Christian, brings him to a remote location, ties him to a tree and tells him about her life with seven different men and the ends they found - at her hand.

I liked a lot about Magdalena Sünderin, but the book never really won me over completely. I would have liked to like it show more more.

Read more on my blog: http://kalafudra.com/2017/06/14/magdalena-sunderin-lilian-faschinger/ show less

After recently moving to Vienna, I was told to read this book and was really fascinated!