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The goalkeeper describes what it is like to face a penalty: should he dive to one side, and if he does will the kicker aim for the other? It is a psychological confrontation in which each tries to outfox the other.
The former goalie interprets an insignificant occurrence—that no one looks up to greet him when he walks in—to mean that he has been fired from the job, and he goes to collect his final...
Apr 1, 2016 · Handke captures his hyper awareness in descriptive passages that reflect the odd acuity of his attention and his internal difficulties with his own fragmenting thoughts. At one point, as Bloch tries desperately to cling to individual words, images briefly replace the terms that have abandoned him.
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is Handke's most famous novel, and in it he distills to an even finer minimalism the angst of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Knut Hamsun's Hunger. The book has no plot other than to get inside the head of a murderer on the run as he flounders about in a ratty Austrian border town.
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Oct 25, 2016 · ‘At the outset of the novel we meet Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had formerly been a well-known soccer goalie. He arrives at work one day and interprets small insignificant signs from his coworkers to mean that he has lost his job and, taking the hint, he leaves.
The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by Handke’s use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys the dislocation and dej vu of modern twentieth-century life.
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Dec 10, 2007 · The first of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that "portrays the...breakdown of a murderer...
