Franzobel is a phenomenon: his casual, easy-drinking writing suggests an entertaining writer, his humor suggests a comedian, and the immense amount of research suggests a historical narrator or reporter.
But none of the categories fits alone, each would fall short for his new book.
After the catastrophe play "The Raft of the Medusa" (2017), the literary counterpart to Géricault's great pictorial allegory and the eyewitness account of a century-long disaster, he now serves us a no less fantastic story with powerful roots in reality.
When Albert Einstein died in Princeton on April 18, 1955, the autopsy pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the dead man's eyes and brain, and the body was cremated as requested.
Harvey wanted to investigate whether special brain-physiological structures allowed conclusions to be drawn about Einstein's genius, parts of which were plastinated for microscopic purposes, the rest of the diced organ kept in jars, which have been preserved in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Chicago.
Such a story was of course an event for the press of the time.
Franzobel, who has immersed himself in this huge hype and, as with the Medusa story, also visited the original locations and this time also interviewed eyewitnesses, takes this boom on the information exchange with him.
And adds whatever comes to mind with his own high spirits and wit.
Sometimes this leads to abstruse detours, which are as entertaining as the plot, but if they were cut significantly, they would not have harmed the book in any way.
Franzobel is just a talker.
But one with spirit.
His idea of attributing the ability to speak and think to the clumps of brains in the glass, which binds and fascinates the pathologist Harvey for over 42 years, while he loses his wives in rows, is of course completely crazy.
Bold like Homunculus, lascivious like Frankenstein's monster
This idea does not refer the text to the realm of fantastic literature, but is an ironic revival of the ancient satirical genre of the conversation about the dead.
However, Einstein talks to living people – initially even in Swiss German from his time at the patent office in Bern.
But there were no discussions, for example with Kurt Gödel, who was only mentioned once, as in Daniel Kehlmann's “Ghosts of Princeton”.
The brain is bold like Faust's homunculus and lascivious like Frankenstein's monster.
Even a prostitute, whose services Harvey enlists for Einstein's remains - who complains about abstinence - makes emotional contact with him.
Even the organ removal at the beginning reveals class.
Anyone who has ever attended an autopsy will find the routine dissection and exenteration precisely repeated here.
Franzobel has already proven himself with a drastic autopsy on the "Medusa" and some creepy amputations and inquests on her raft.
It is observed and recorded by the narrator, the FBI agent Sam Shepherd, who works almost entirely in the background.
It is supposed to uncover Einstein's communist activities;
when the job later becomes superfluous, he is deported to a lunatic asylum.
But from the dissection onwards, he stays hot on Harvey's heels and describes the brain-wrestling between Einstein's son, the executor and the pathologists' superiors.