The goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick, [Paperback]

Peter Handke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1972

The first of 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 in ways that recall Camus's The Stranger"  (Richard Locke, The New York Times). 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 his use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world" (Bill Marx, Boston Sunday Globe).

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde, denouncing all social, psychological and historical categories of experience as species of linguistic fraud. But [he] has aged well and now…is regarded as one of the most important writers in German." --Richard Locke, The New York Times

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 133 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1972)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374163766
• ISBN-13: 978-0374163761
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,886,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "When he put on an act, one word still nicely yielded the next...", August 9, 2011

By 

A Certain Bibliophile (San Antonio, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel (Paperback)

This review contains spoilers.

In this novel, "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick," Peter Handke puts on full display the self-conscious experimentation for which he has become so well-known over the last four decades. This is Handke's third novel (originally published in Germany in 1970), and his first to be translated into English in 1972. Because of its length - only 130 pages - I would suggest this as a good starting place for those who think they might be interested in the voice of Handke's early fiction.

While the plot is perhaps not the most important aspect of the book, a précis is appropriate. Bloch, a construction worker, is laid off in the first sentence of the book. In a kind of heightened euphoria, Bloch checks into a hotel with only a suitcase, occasionally leaving to visit the cinema. He notices a young woman there, and spends the night with her. For some reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, Bloch murders her in her apartment. Emotion, motive, and fury are all completely excised from the tone of the novel, even in relation to this act. The reader never learns if Bloch is exhilarated or ashamed or scared of being caught. Shortly afterwards, he leaves for a small town on the Austrian border where still more events occur that should faze him, but they never seem to. The last few pages shed light on the meaning of the title is a way that is simply too good to divulge here.

Handke uses some brilliant social critique, especially on the subjects of consumerism and the meaningless of small talk shared with strangers. At one point, he is sitting in a café with two young women. "We buy all our dressed ready-made," one tells him. "We do each other's hair." "In the summer it's usually getting light by the time we finally get home." "I prefer the slow dances." "On the trip home we don't joke around as much anymore, then we forget about talking." Handke deftly communicates the crushing smallness of people. Another time, Bloch compulsively asks what everything is worth, including the furniture in his hotel room, as if fascinated and compelled by the idea that money could be the sole metric of worth. To borrow the argot of Tonnies, a sense of decadence - the fall from a traditional Gemeinschaft to a post-industrial Gesellschaft suffuses the novel, wherein old ways of communicating, emoting, and going about our day-to-day lives have been radically reconfigured. While I don't read German, I have the feeling that the translator, Michael Roloff, had a big part in achieving these effects, too.

The most engaging part of the novel, at least for me, was its experimental style. Of course, depending on personal preferences, some might find it the most frustrating. Handke writes in flat, declarative, staccato sentences, which has the odd effect of spreading Bloch's emotional numbness to even the reader. The novel focuses in on language to show its strengths, but also its glaring flaws. You get the feeling that Handke has quarried the words for his novella over a period of months or years, never with the naïve assumption that they could ever be ready-made tools for our passive use. In doing so, he issues forth a thoroughly invigorating critique of language and language use. It was akin to reading Wittgenstein, had he written fiction.

All in all, it was not a wholly unpleasurable experience, even if it was more experimental than most fiction that I do read. However, I appreciated this novel more than I enjoyed it. Handke certainly does bring a lot to the table as far as questioning what fiction does, how it's performed, and what it can do for us. If you like your fiction to delve into these questions, you might find this highly enjoyable. If not, and you haven't read anything by him, you may want to read this anyway: it's short, and Handke has often been called one of the greatest living writers in the German language.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great page-turner; an unconventional novel., May 6, 2002

By 

Georgios Chalkiadakis (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick, (Paperback)

An excellent psychography of the modern city dweller.
An ordinary working man suddenly senses that all his world is falling apart. He "reacts" to this with apathy and the conduction of a murder that has no apparent motive; no attempt is made to rationalize it. All of a sudden, he is a murderer. He then goes on moving from place to place, looking without seeing, focusing on details rather than on meanings. He passively waits for what is to come, without really thinking about it. The ending is sublime...