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The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Peter Handke,

Drinka Gojković (Translator),

Michael E. Roloff (Translation)

3.18 · Rating details · 3,466 ratings · 435 reviews

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 borde

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Paperback, 133 pages

Published December 10th 2007 by Farrar Straus Giroux (first published 1970)

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Jun 25, 2014 Lisa rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nobels, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, peter-handke

The Reader's Anxiety At The Nobel Announcement!

Why?

Honestly, I don't even know where to start. The Swedish Academy announces about a month or so ago that they are trying to correct their former eurocentrism and male centrism - by choosing another male, white, European writer of questionable dignity and out-of-date ideas on national identity politics?

Is that supposed to be the change? I have better hopes of the female European that was simultaneously awarded the 2018 prize, but I can't really se ...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Evan rated it it was ok

Shelves: crime-fiction, _less-than-200-pages, __in-my-collection, 2011-reads, kickass-titles

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 ...more

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Jan 02, 2020 Cody rated it really liked it

First 80 pages: hated every word.

(Steps outside and smokes a joint)

Last 50 pages: greatest book ever written.

Take from that what you will—

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Jul 09, 2008 Jason added it

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 ...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Mary rated it really liked it

Recommended to Mary by: Mark

Shelves: 2013, austria, fiction

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). He spends the remainder of the time wandering aimlessly, overwhelmed with weird compulsions and distorted observations, slowly but surely losing his grip on reality. This book is one long, dar ...more

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Aug 23, 2019 Steven Godin rated it it was ok

Shelves: austria, fiction

The reader's anxiety at trying to get through this!
Two-thirds of the way in I happily kicked it into touch.

Shouldn't even be mentioned in the same vein as Camus's The Stranger.
That was a masterpiece. This is not far from being a train wreck of a novel.

Won't put me off reading Handke again though, as it can't get as bad as this again surely?
Some of his other stuff has been pretty good, so there is still hope the next time I read him. ...more

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Aug 12, 2004 Proustitute (on hiatus) rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2012, german-literature

This slim book seems to draw readymade comparisons to Camus's L'Étranger, which I think is a very poor way to approach Handke's novella. While both texts deal with a man in an existential crisis and while there are murders, the similarities end there. Camus is concerned with the dissolution of a specific kind of French masculine identity; Handke's subject matter here is analogous, but this is a text very rooted in Austrian anxieties in the late-1960s.

If anything, The Goalie... should draw compar ...more

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Sep 01, 2020 JJ rated it liked it

Um, what did I just read? This was weird, like a mix of Kafka, and Hemingway. And Delillo, totally, just worse. No particular plot, straightforward writing, hmm... I don't know if I would give it 3 or 4 stars - I really expected more from Handke. Anyway, I will read something else from him, before I judge :) (my first Handke novel) Final rating: 3.5 stars. ...more

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May 15, 2019 Jonfaith rated it really liked it

Goalie is a manic noir, a Touch of Evil in the Austrian hinterland, it is breathless and yet sober—we follow a former footballer as he’s sacked from his construction job and begins a peripatetic towards meaning, though the layers fall away and language becomes so much dust. A curt wind arrives to scatter, motivation is just another accessory, the reptilian protagonist isn’t fleeing as much as refining. A local missing child reveals another fissure but the goalkeeper much like the reader can’t pa ...more

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Aug 23, 2015 Jos rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: german-lit, sz-bibliothek

While sitting in a café and reading this, the waitress asked me if this is a book about football. I quickly tried to find the least embarrassing answer: reading about football or reading about a man losing his grip on reality. I went for the lukewarm option and said that it's hard to explain in a few words.

I have a problem with this book. It's not enjoyable to read, it's not a topic I'm interested in. I don't even want to talk about what I'm reading there. I merely read it as it was on my shelf ...more

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Nov 22, 2019 Jerry Pogan rated it it was ok

I've read at least one book of all of the Nobel winners and many of them I've read most of the books they wrote but this is one writer that I will stick with just the one book. I'm completely unimpressed and if I didn't know better I would have thought it was written by a twelve year old. It is written in a very minimalist style with little variation and drones on in the same subdued monotone regardless of the situation, including descriptions of a murder and fights the protagonist was involved ...more

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Oct 08, 2014 Czarny Pies rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Des gens biens entourés de copains litterairs.

Recommended to Czarny by: Les gens qui m'avaient promis une soiree a la brasserie apres.

Shelves: german-lit

Lire, c'est penible. Assister a une representation, c'est un veritable calvaire.

While I was at university in the mid-1970s I went to see a performance of this play at a small 50 seat theatre in the bohemian quarter of town. Such an intimate venue offers the possibility of a very powerful dramatic experience. The negative aspect of this is that it becomes impossible to walk out because the actor has made eye contact with you on several occasions. Honestly if I had to do it all over again, I would ...more

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Aug 15, 2016 Andrew added it

Shelves: austrian-fiction, german-language-fiction

A short, frantic novel about the rougher edges, The Goalie's Anxiety is appropriately named... not that there's much to do about football, except in a couple of critical scenes, but there is a lot of anxiety. A lot of comparisons are made to The Stranger. After all, there is the same sort of existential dread, predicated on a senseless murder, featuring a luckless loser, but a better comparison for me in tone would be Antonioni's Blow-Up. It also features a senseless murder, but takes place on t ...more

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Dec 06, 2020 George rated it liked it

Shelves: 1001-books-list-read-2006

3.5 stars. An intriguing, vivid, original, memorable novella about the week in the self destruction of Bloch, a soccer goalie turned construction worker. Bloch’s life has become absurd and pointless. I found the sparse, fractured prose helped in propelling this short story forward. Whilst not a totally satisfying or enjoyable read, I liked the originality in the storytelling.

The author, Peter Handke, an Austrian, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2019.

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Feb 26, 2009 Ben Loory rated it really liked it

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 thomp 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. ...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Henry Martin rated it really liked it

Shelves: permanent-collection

I received this book as a gift, and, prior to reading it, I've never heard of Peter Handke or this work. This is to say that I did not know what to expect. While the cover is not particularly interesting, the strong title grabbed my attention. Also, the front cover blurb mentions Camus's The Stranger. I'm intrigued.

Personally, I did not find much in a way of similarity between this work and Camus's work. I did find a little Kafka, a little Hamsun, a little Leppin...but I was rather surprised by ...more

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Jan 05, 2020 Sidharth Vardhan rated it it was ok

Shelves: 4-europe, list-1001, nobel

An expelled goalie murders a woman randomly, walks around anxiously observing random observations and... that is all about it. Camus' Stranger was a book in its own league and so I won't compare this to it. What is more, Camus' Stranger wasn't this dumb. In Sartre's Nausea too, the protagonist was a white middle-aged European man but that man too was struggling with intuitive observations. Clezio's 'The Interrogation' is yet another book and one that seems to most resemble this one most - of a n ...more

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Jan 11, 2020 Swakkhar rated it really liked it

Slow and dark! I thought to finish this small book in a quick sitting, it made me to go with its pace.

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May 10, 2019 John Hatley rated it liked it · review of another edition

An interesting book with a tricky, somewhat difficult-to-follow style. I may have to read it again with much more concentration to understand it.

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Oct 24, 2019 Daranuța Cristina added it · review of another edition

I really tried to read it, but... it is just unreadable. It's boring and bland. No more Handke for me. ...more

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Jan 03, 2021 Dimitris rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Two very generous stars. This was nothing, practically zero literary merit of any kind...

flag 9 likes · Like · see review

Jul 17, 2020 William Adams rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary

Cryptic is the word that best describes this novella. A man bumps around an Austrian village for 120 pages and nothing happens. He eats, drinks, smokes, reads newspapers, and then it ends. So what is the point?

The book's main achievement is to show a story that describes the details of life as lived, and no more. It avoids interpretation, theory, romance, philosophy, emotion, and literary style. It is just pure description. And yet this is not an exercise in "objectivism" where everything is an Cryptic is the word that best describes this novella. A man bumps around an Austrian village for 120 pages and nothing happens. He eats, drinks, smokes, reads newspapers, and then it ends. So what is the point?

The book's main achievement is to show a story that describes the details of life as lived, and no more. It avoids interpretation, theory, romance, philosophy, emotion, and literary style. It is just pure description. And yet this is not an exercise in "objectivism" where everything is an object seen from the outside, as it would be in a technical manual. This is a deeply psychological story. Although the narrator is third-person, it is "close," so we are inside the mind of the protagonist most of the time. Here are the opening two lines:

"When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had once been a well-known soccer goalie, reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired. At least that was how he interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he appeared at the door of the construction shack."

The first line is almost purely objective. It introduces the main character, gives his backstory, sets the time and place. The last phrase (the heart of the sentence) is in the passive voice, creating emotional distance between the narrator and the character, cueing us in to the prevailing tone.

That first sentence does a lot of work but the second is a U-turn, marked by the qualifier, "at least." Now we are suddenly inside the head of Bloch, seeing the world from his point of view, and we immediately notice he is a disturbed person. He assumed he was fired because no one looked at him? That's nuts, and we know we're in for a ride.

That's masterful writing and we are not surprised that the author has won a Nobel Prize. Digging deeper, we notice that Bloch is a construction worker. What did he construct? Buildings, presumably, edifices, monuments like novels and their vast, complex stories. If the author is also in the "construction" business, erecting stories on frameworks of ideas, then the first sentence tells us that the present novel will not be that. The construction-worker is fired, so you can forget about an elaborately-constructed story.

We have a mini-autobiography embedded in the opening. We learn that the author formerly wrote traditional stories with dramatic, emotional endings, because Bloch used to be a goalie. But now, as the title of the novel itself tells us, the author is very uncomfortable with that model. He has left the world of traditional story-construction. Why? Maybe because nobody paid much attention to his earlier books. At least, that's why Bloch assumed he was fired – nobody looked at him.

Not to over-analyze, but I think the writing is fantastic in this novella. The pattern of the opening, objective-subjective, is repeated throughout, to dizzying effect.

"Bloch did not answer. She replied to his silence by bunching up the dirty towel—or rather, Bloch assumed that her bunching up of the towel was a response to his silence." (p. 43)

Bloch is not even willing to say for sure what motives he reads in other people. He just assumes, based on the evidence of the senses, just as the narrator will not assert any motivation for Bloch. You have to infer. Like the protagonist in Camus' "L'Etranger," Bloch might kill a man on a beach for no reason. He is a person with a mind, but he is very much dissociated from the world he lives in.

If you're looking for car chases and squishy relationships, you won't find them here. This is challenging experimental fiction with a lot to offer anyone who takes it seriously.

Handke, Peter (1970). The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. New York: Farrar, Strause and Giroux, 133 pp. ...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Knar rated it really liked it

Contains spoils, spoilage, spoilers.

Well, this book deserves a second read. Or, rather, I deserve to allow myself a second read. But, until then:

The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a brisk novella, one that briskly breaks apart in a rather fractal-like fashion. The cookie, if you will, crumbles into self-similar little crumblettes, which, while varying in size and texture, involve similar fixations and interrogate similar concerns.

What does it mean to act in way x? If a man acts in wa ...more

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Dec 26, 2014 Kimbofo rated it liked it

Shelves: translated-fiction

Austrian writer Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was first published in 1970. According to the blurb on the back of my 2007 reprint, it caused quite a stir in Europe and the United States at the time, because of its “innovative use of language and its searing portrait of a troubled man in an equally troubled society”.

It came to my attention after I read a rather wonderful interview with MJ Hyland in which she named it as one of her influences. I love Hyland’s work (you can Austrian writer Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was first published in 1970. According to the blurb on the back of my 2007 reprint, it caused quite a stir in Europe and the United States at the time, because of its “innovative use of language and its searing portrait of a troubled man in an equally troubled society”.

It came to my attention after I read a rather wonderful interview with MJ Hyland in which she named it as one of her influences. I love Hyland’s work (you can read all my reviews of her novels here) and this book sounded like something I’d like, so I promptly ordered a copy online. Fittingly, it arrived just in time for German Literature Month, which runs throughout November, and was an “interesting” palette cleanser after reading a steady stream of Canadian fiction for my Shadow Giller obligations.

The story is a simple one (though it’s astonishingly told): Joseph Bloch is a once-famous soccer goalkeeper (the “goalie” of the title), who has just lost his job on a construction site. With nothing to occupy his days and no friends of whom to speak, he fills in time by going to the cinema, where he develops a “thing” for the cashier, whom he later murders, almost by accident and without thinking of the consequences.

He flees to a village on the Austrian border, where he re-establishes contact with an old girlfriend, who runs a public house. By coincidence the neighbourhood is filled with police, all on the hunt for a missing boy. Bloch’s days are mostly filled wandering around aimlessly, observing the search efforts from afar; his evenings drinking in the pub. Nothing much happens.

But it’s not so much the actual things that Joseph does, but what goes on in his head that makes this novella such an intriguing read. Surprisingly, given it’s written in the third person, we get an alarming view of Bloch’s mental state and his subsequent decent into a kind of madness.

In many ways it’s like Bloch is watching a movie with the sound turned down too low. He has problems with his memory — he often gets a feeling of deja vu, as if it takes his mind a few seconds to catch up with his actions — and constantly mishears things or is woken up by noises that don’t actually exist.

To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.
...more

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Feb 26, 2020 Pavel Nedelcu rated it really liked it

Shelves: nobel-prize-literature, literatures-in-german, austrian-literature

An unconventional analysis of the human character and the constant quest for a social identity. The inner crisis of the Kafkian protagonist Bloch is not only describing an early case of schizophrenia, but is also related to a need to understand what his own place in a society in which he used to serve as a soccer goalkeeper has, in the meantime, become.
A radical, conscious choice is that of becoming a murderer; and this not for the mere pleasure of killing (or at least not physically), but as a ...more

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Mar 02, 2015 Blair rated it it was amazing

At times this felt irritating, with its obsessive flat narration of events, but the book grew on me more and more as it progressed over its very short length. Handke reads like a postmodern version of Hemingway and the novel has some echoes of Camus' The Stranger with its apparently senseless murder. It becomes really interesting as the protagonist, Bloch, starts to become more and more estranged from the world around him: he loses control over language, misinterprets gestures and can't count fr ...more

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Mar 22, 2011 Jeff rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Charlotte Albert

A deconstructionists wet dream. It's all about how we make meaning, cause and effect, the purpose of language, and all that shit that was big-doin's in the '70s and early '80s when this book was published. So it's all pretty experimental stuff. Which is why the story is of secondary importance...if that. 15 years ago when I was in grad school this book would have excited me, but now it just has a lame story. I could spend some time with it, trying to get to the bottom of Handke's point, but I ju ...more

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Jun 29, 2010 Heather rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I hoped this book would help me understand why soccer goalies kill people, but I am still at a loss. The concept intrigued me though, but unfortunatly the book did not.

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Jun 09, 2018 Terence rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

Somewhere between Kargl's "Angst" and Camus "The Stranger" this story is easy to get through about a man who commits a murder and aimlessly wanders around an Austrian town. It has some moments especially towards the end that really reflect the state of mind of the killer. Wish Handke wasn't such a fascist sympathizing tool bag or it'd be a bit easier to endorse. ...more

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Oct 12, 2019 Erica added it

Shelves: 2019

enjoyed this, unfortunately. he wasn't lying when he said his books were about nothing ...more

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About Peter Handke

Peter Handke

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Peter Handke is an Avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright. His body of work has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. He has also collaborated with German director Wim Wenders, writing the script for The Wrong Move and co-writing the screenplay for Wings of Desire.