About book The Goalie's Anxiety At The Penalty Kick (2007)
There are books that are both beyond parody and beyond criticism, and this is one of them.In the case of parody, I considered writing one but realized that the results would look exactly like the book itself, which would serve little purpose other than to hold a mirror to it, when merely quoting extended passages from it (which I won't do) would give the review reader a taste of the style and content along with showing the inherent difficulty of parodying same.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 Metamorphis 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. All the while I read it I couldn't help but think I might be liking this more if Graham Greene had written it with his sly and humorous ironic touches.But Handke is a glum Austrian and the results are sterile and clinical and fairly humorless. The protagonist of the piece (related in the third person, not the first) is a Mr. Bloch, who was once a soccer goalie and a construction worker. We never are told why he was cast away from either of these avocations, nor are we provided any motivation for the killing that sets him further adrift. We don't really need to know, I suppose; this is a book about modern ennui, and the pleasure to be had in the reading of it--for lack of a better word--is in the evocation of Bloch's claustrophic inner world and the way he relates his observations of the world around him to that strange inner place. The detailing of Bloch's perceived universe is penny plain, neither truly vivid nor obscure. It's an odd balance between the extremes of Henry James and Hemingway. And it can't be wholly said to be stream-of-consciousness either (in the Joycean sense) because too many of Bloch's inner thoughts have been left out by the omniscient narrator. We're never quite certain, but suspect Bloch may have a bit of amnesia. Or is simply in denial. Or a tad schizo.That said, I can't say I was enamored of the book, but I can see why it has its admirers.I saw Wim Wender's 1972 film adaptation about 20 years ago, so my memory of that is a bit vague. I seem to remember the goalie's anxiety being more explicitly depicted in the film as an actual incident in Bloch's life. That is, he is shown failing to deflect a shot on the goal. In the book, there is no such incident depicted (if it did happen, we are not told of it). The only time a goalie's plight is mentioned the goalie succeeds. That might be considered a spoiler, but really it's not--it does not alter the so-called plot one bit.One never really gets the sense that Bloch is hiding out or caring whether or not he is captured for his crime. It is all an absurd universe, and the point is underlined by the fact that the police are combing the area of the Austrian border town not for him but for a missing local child and his possible killer. Bloch, an oddly oblivious stranger in town, ironically never seems to draw anyone's attention.Most of the book details Bloch as he arises from bed, watches TV, has bizarre conversations and encounters with the denizens of the inn, drinks and listens to the conversations in a tavern, attends and falls asleep at the movies, tries to pick up girls in the street, walks around the town, kicks a dead weasel, and so on. Oftentimes we get hints of his disordered brain: his tendency to overdefine phenomena around him or to try to find karmic relations between unrelated things.Every once in awhile, you stumble across a cool sentence such as, "He was talking with the postmistress...in a murmur that sounded to Bloch like those passages in foreign films that are left untranslated because they are supposed to be incomprehensible anyway."It's a sentence that probably well sums up the experience of reading this book.
i have to admit, when i started reading this, my first thought was: "oh god, this shit again???" because really, on the face of it, does the world really need yet another kill-somebody-go-crazy book? or even a go-crazy-kill-somebody book? didn't we have enough with the stranger and ten THOUSAND different noirs-- including every book jim thompson ever wrote?and really, i felt pretty much the same at the end. storywise, every single jim thompson book is better than this, and every single jim thompson character is more interesting, and every single jim thompson scene hits harder and is more convincing in terms of psychosis.BUT! the writing in this book is brilliant. so many marvelous (and marvelously funny) ideas and sections and paragraphs and sentences (and pictograms!?!). i think in general, this is actually more of a comedy about a guy going crazy than anything else. i mean, it's all just so funny (and true-- peter handke has been there, that's for sure).i could quote pretty much any page, they're all equally brilliant. but this, for some reason, really pleased me:In a stationary store Bloch bought a tourist map of the region and had it well wrapped. He also bought a pencil; the pencil he asked to have put in a paper bag. With the rolled-up map in his hand, he walked on; he felt more harmless now than before, when his hands had been empty.Outside the town, at a spot where he had a full view of the area, he sat down on a bench and, using the pencil, compared the details on the map with the items in the landscape in front of him. Key to the symbols: these circles mean a deciduous forest, those triangles a coniferous one, and when you looked up from the map, you were astonished that it was true. Over there, the terrain had to be swampy; over there, there had to be a wayside shrine; over there, there had to be a railroad crossing. If you walked along this dirt road, you had to cross a bridge here, then had to walk up a steep incline, where, since somebody might be waiting on top, you had to turn off the path and run across this field, had to run toward this forest-- luckily, a coniferous forest-- but someone might possibly come at you out of the forest, so that you had to double back and then run down this slope toward this farmhouse, had to run past this shed, then run along this brook, had to leap over it at this spot because a jeep might come at you here, then zigzag across this field, slip through the hedge onto the street where a truck was just going by, which you could stop and then you were safe. Bloch stopped short. "If it's a question of murder, your mind jumps from one thing to another," he had heard someone say in a movie.
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The Seventies and Eighties were most fertile in Germany on the cultural level. The years of lead revealed many artists. I have a deep admiration for Peter Handke who is one of great living writers. he didn't recieve the Nobel Prize because of his support for Milosévic.It is necessary to speak about his collaboration with Wim Wenders. They are two artists of the wandering. This book was adapted in film. An expelled goalkeeper who wanders without goal. he kills the woman he allured. He turns over in his native village like a regression.In this traumatized Germany, its crime appears almost normal because of loss of landmarks.
—Philippe Malzieu
What a strange and unsettling book!I have never heard of Handke before but was immediately struck by chords of Kafka and Hesse. The atmosphere of this story reeks with anxiety and a nervous, ominous tension that never lets up.Early in the book the protagonist (view spoiler)[murders a woman (hide spoiler)]
—Mary
I wanted to re-read this book as soon as I finished it. I loved the movement of the whole thing and how it sat in my mind. I couldn't put it into any kind of category or reduce it. After some pacing and deliberation, I stole this book from the Notre Dame library; they wouldn't let me get a library card and I really wanted to read it. The security guard wasn't at his post. I avoided the exit sensor gates by going out through the entrance. You couldn't open the entrance doors from the inside, so I had to wait for someone to come in and catch the door. My heart was beating like a madman. It was fun. I returned the book a couple months later (after I'd re-read it).
—Jason
