The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (FSG Classics)
This short novel follows Josef Bloch, a former goalkeeper who believes he has lost his job, drifts through town, and commits a sudden murder. Rather than emphasizing plot melodrama, it traces a chilling breakdown in perception and language.
Work Information
The crime occurs almost flatly, while the outlines of the world begin to break apart.
An early major work by Peter Handke, the novel uses the aftermath of a seemingly arbitrary murder to examine how language organizes and distorts reality. Its cool surface and unstable perception made it one of Handke's defining works.
Review Summaries
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The spare, fractured style is often read as the force that makes the protagonist's collapse vivid. Some readers find the distance demanding, but that hardness is also what gives the novel its tension.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published
- 2007-12-10
- Pages
- 144 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.84 x 1.02 x 20.83 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374531065
- ISBN-10
- 0374531064
- Price
- 3123 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Contemporary
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 in ways that recall Camus's The Stranger " ( 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 Handke's 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" ( Boston Sunday Globe).
Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick , A Sorrow Beyond Dreams , My Year in the No-Man's Bay , and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos , all published by FSG. Handke's dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire . Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Michael Roloff contributed to Peter Camenzind from Picador.
Reviews
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Great!
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Steve’s two star review says more about Steve than about this book. Obviously he thought it was a sports book. There can be no other reason for the two stars. Personally, I cannot praise it highly enough but then again I’m probably going to put a plastic bag over my head and slit my wrists in a hot bath some night like Jerzy Kosinski did. I’d have done it already but for this book and others like it. A great read.
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A complex examination of the slow disintegration of the mind and the consequences which flow if those who care are not here
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Very sparse and unadorned to the point of almost clinical disengagement. Very interesting and disturbing albeit occasionally the disengagement can be the reader’s.
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Though I don't speak German (but am a least good enough with written languages to pick out certain words), I think the version I read was probably a very poor translation (to English). To begin with, the title probably should be translated to "The Angst of the Goalkeeper at the Eleven-Meter." I picked out the book for two reasons. First, I had just finished reading Don DeLillo's "The Names," which I loved, and it got me doing some Internet research on DeLillo. I found something in which he referenced Handke's novel, and I was intrigued by the title (which, if I recall correctly, was neither the way it was translated for the version I read nor the way I would have translated it). Second, I then read reviews of Handke's book, which said the language was interesting and beautiful and that the book made quite a stir when it came out in 1970. That beauty is not to be found in this particular translation. The story is easy to follow. But because the language is so klunky, I don't care much about what is happening in the story.