As soon as he falls into his grandfather's clutches, fourteen-year-old Frank becomes Frankie, his mother a shadow of himself and morality a mere obstacle.

When the mysterious old man is released from prison after eighteen years, he is by no means frail and tame.

Rather, he towers over them all, despite the crooked position, and distributes properly at the first opportunity.

Without further ado, he sends the intimidated daughter away in order to happily devour the grandson, grind him up mercilessly and spit him out again completely disfigured.

At least his name: "You're Frank, ha!

frankie

Frankie boy, ha!

Little Frankie Boy,” he adds with more and more accessories until there is hardly anything left of the actual core.

Michael Köhlmeier has just turned to the furry polymath "Matou" as an apparent role model for ETA Hoffmann's Kater Murr and has made great strides through world history. With "Frankie" he is now presenting an entertaining novel spanning a period of a few weeks.

It's still philosophical, after all, it's about the arbitrariness of violence and what images of masculinity can do.

But at its core, it's about a name.

Ultimately no escape

It is certainly nothing new that the name serves as a literary instrument of power.

Nabokov presented what is probably the most impressive passage when he had Humbert Humbert empathize with the nickname of his just twelve-year-old beloved with his tongue and - "Lo-li-ta" - master it instead of the girl.

On the other hand, the family name is also a hindrance, for example for the most famous lovers in world literature.

"What is a name?" Shakespeare's Juliet tries to make a meaningless shell, which is fateful, in order to escape the pull of the family feud.

Ultimately, however, there is no escape, not even in Köhlmeier's new novel.

Apart from the friction with the grandfather, it doesn't start that badly.

Together with his mother, who only exists in her role as "mama", Frank Thaler lives in Blechturmgasse in Vienna's fourth district and is therefore in the middle of a world to which he is completely adapted.

On Sundays, the two go for a walk in the Prater, in the evening he conducts the theme tune of the “Tatort” for them, on Wednesdays he does the cooking, and everything is always harmonious between the two.

"By the time grandpa showed up, we were both mom and I, the first people," the fourteen-year-old first-person narrator compares life on the first floor with the Garden of Eden.

At first, the protagonist's peculiar mode of expression conceals what becomes more and more apparent as the story progresses: the paradisiacal harmony stems from the mother's need to write over her trauma as the daughter of a criminal and as a single parent abandoned by the dominant child's father, while ignoring everything that she considered masculine and dangerous - also in relation to the prepubescent son, whose emancipation from the maternal idyll is not planned.

Accordingly, the dismissal of the grandfather is a kind of liberation for the grandson as a belated disconnection from the oedipal construct: Frank sees himself at the beginning as "someone from the world" and shakes the hand of the "alien" to get back on,