Publication
Utrecht NBC 2019
ISBN
9789492313966
Language
Collections
Description
The first of Peter Handke's novels to be published in English,The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kickis a true modern classic that "portrays the...breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus'sThe 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).
Genres
User reviews
LibraryThing member Nickelini
Such an extremely odd book. Not sure how to describe it. Definitely not a fun, pleasant read, and in parts it was boring. That said, however, I'm glad I read it, and on some level I found it absolutely fascinating. It's about an ex-soccer goalie and former construction worker who wanders around
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Austria with little explanation or purpose. Early in the novel, he murders someone for no apparent reason. The thing that I found most fascinating about the novella was the narration: the narrator appears to be omniscient, but the voice really follows only the main character, and is very selective about what it says. In some parts it goes into extensive detail, and in others it is incredibly vague. The language is deceptively simple, perhaps matching the vocabulary with that of the uneducated goalie. The only time he is able to articulate himself effectively is when he talks about soccer. The ending is unusual, and going out on a limb here (and this isn't a spoiler), I think it tells the reader not to overthink things--which most readers have probably done if they've made it to the end. A very existential book. Recommended for its narrative technique, but not for the story. Show Less
LibraryThing member kant1066
As with most all of Gide's best novels, this one concerns the anxiety and yearning at the heart of human experience. A very young Jerome Palissier regularly spends holidays at the house of his aunt and uncle's estate in Fongueusemare in rural Normandy. One day, he happens upon his cousin Alissa,
Jerome and Alissa spend irenic summers together reciting poetry, reading from books to one another in their splendid garden, and enjoying music. The appropriateness of Jerome's name jumps out at you when he mentions another of their mutual literary interests: "We had procured the Gospels in the Vulgate and knew long passages of them by heart." (It was Saint Jerome who made the first Latin translation of the Bible.) Jerome wishes to become engaged before moving off to the Ecole Normale, but Alissa refuses. He is understandably upset by her rejection, but is only more spurred on by his ecstatic vision (again, that religious imagery) of eventually marrying her. Eventually, we learn that Alissa has sacrificed Jerome so that her sister, Juliette, will be able to get married first, yet even after Juliette gets married - to a boorish, business-minded vintner - Alissa continues to push him away.
He visits her at Fongueusemare while finishing both his schooling and a military stint, but every time he mentions wanting to marry her, she rejects him and requests that he leave soon, that she cannot bear his presence. Eventually, she tells him that her love of God surpasses her love for him, even though she has always passionately loved Jerome. During their last meeting together, Alissa has grown thin and pale, presumably because of her anchorite-like existence; she has also removed the books of poetry and novels she and Jerome used to read together, and replaced them with works of cheap, vulgar piety. Even while there is room here to doubt Alissa's love for Jerome, a chapter that includes her personal journals makes it perfectly clear that she loved Jerome just as much as he loved her, if not more so. Jerome has a final meeting with Juliette while she is enceinte with her fifth child by the vintner. Seeing him calls to mind both her sister's Christ-like sacrifice and makes her reflect on her own uneventful, bourgeois life. As Flaubert said: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi."
For maximum effect, as noted above, read this right next to Gide's "The Immoralist" for a most effective couple of case studies. Considering the year of publication (1909) and the ideas considered - repression, sexuality, sublimation - it should be noted that Gide almost certainly had Freud in mind when he was writing this, though it yields wonderful insights into human psychology even without a Freudian reading.
When reading a novel, sometimes the most difficult obstacle to being able to truly and fully appreciate it is the historical change that has taken place between the time in which it was written and when you read it. Judging from some of the reviews I have seen, that seems to be the case with this novel, too. In both this and "The Immoralist," Gide looks at the tension, confusion, and repression that can often come about when romantic love is pitted against, and forced to compete with, love for the divine. Since this novel was published, this antagonism has almost completely died, which may lead some readers to accuse Alissa of being frigid. Once we are able to bridge that historical gap, however, and realize that Alissa did not see her torment as self-imposed but rather something that was required of her, this novel proves itself to be a superior meditation on both romantic passion and, what was once thought to be its opposite, sacrifice.
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who is distraught at her aloof, hypochondriacal mother. Both desperate to rescue her and drawn by a genuine affection, Jerome takes it upon himself to sweep in and rescue her like a good, Christian knight errant. The subtle imagery of Jerome as a kind of salvific hero is only a foreshadowing of the religious unease that drives this novel forward toward its foreordained conclusion. As Jerome portentously declares, quoting Baudelaire, "Bientot nous plongerons dons les froides tenebres."Jerome and Alissa spend irenic summers together reciting poetry, reading from books to one another in their splendid garden, and enjoying music. The appropriateness of Jerome's name jumps out at you when he mentions another of their mutual literary interests: "We had procured the Gospels in the Vulgate and knew long passages of them by heart." (It was Saint Jerome who made the first Latin translation of the Bible.) Jerome wishes to become engaged before moving off to the Ecole Normale, but Alissa refuses. He is understandably upset by her rejection, but is only more spurred on by his ecstatic vision (again, that religious imagery) of eventually marrying her. Eventually, we learn that Alissa has sacrificed Jerome so that her sister, Juliette, will be able to get married first, yet even after Juliette gets married - to a boorish, business-minded vintner - Alissa continues to push him away.
He visits her at Fongueusemare while finishing both his schooling and a military stint, but every time he mentions wanting to marry her, she rejects him and requests that he leave soon, that she cannot bear his presence. Eventually, she tells him that her love of God surpasses her love for him, even though she has always passionately loved Jerome. During their last meeting together, Alissa has grown thin and pale, presumably because of her anchorite-like existence; she has also removed the books of poetry and novels she and Jerome used to read together, and replaced them with works of cheap, vulgar piety. Even while there is room here to doubt Alissa's love for Jerome, a chapter that includes her personal journals makes it perfectly clear that she loved Jerome just as much as he loved her, if not more so. Jerome has a final meeting with Juliette while she is enceinte with her fifth child by the vintner. Seeing him calls to mind both her sister's Christ-like sacrifice and makes her reflect on her own uneventful, bourgeois life. As Flaubert said: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi."
For maximum effect, as noted above, read this right next to Gide's "The Immoralist" for a most effective couple of case studies. Considering the year of publication (1909) and the ideas considered - repression, sexuality, sublimation - it should be noted that Gide almost certainly had Freud in mind when he was writing this, though it yields wonderful insights into human psychology even without a Freudian reading.
When reading a novel, sometimes the most difficult obstacle to being able to truly and fully appreciate it is the historical change that has taken place between the time in which it was written and when you read it. Judging from some of the reviews I have seen, that seems to be the case with this novel, too. In both this and "The Immoralist," Gide looks at the tension, confusion, and repression that can often come about when romantic love is pitted against, and forced to compete with, love for the divine. Since this novel was published, this antagonism has almost completely died, which may lead some readers to accuse Alissa of being frigid. Once we are able to bridge that historical gap, however, and realize that Alissa did not see her torment as self-imposed but rather something that was required of her, this novel proves itself to be a superior meditation on both romantic passion and, what was once thought to be its opposite, sacrifice.
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LibraryThing member thorold
The novella Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter seems to be the most famous of Handke's early works, and it is one of those great titles that sticks in your mind whether or not you've actually read it. A bit like The loneliness of the long-distance runner and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum:
It turns out that this is actually an elegant little philosophical investigation into the problem of language and meaning, with echoes of classic existentialist texts like L'étranger. The central character, Bloch, experiences a kind of disconnection in which the relationship of objects to words, of words to abstract meanings, of events and statements to each other, are all destabilised and put into question. Football does come into the story at a couple of points, most crucially in the closing scene, but it isn't really a football story. There's a lot of insistence on the detail of ordinary things: what the world looks like when you're a little bit disconnected from it, and Handke maintains a very flat, undemonstrative style, in which apparently minor things, like a coin falling out of a pocket, are treated with as much weight as extreme acts of violence. I think I would find this pretentious in a longer book, but in a short novella like this I found it an interestingly different way of looking at things. It obviously wasn't Handke's main aim to create a historical snapshot of life in a small community in southern Austria at the end of the sixties, but reading the book 45 years on, the degree of observation of everyday things that comes out of the peculiar narrative style is also very interesting from that point of view.
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titles that seem to be micro-stories in their own right. But it's also probably the main reason why I hadn't read anything by Handke. On the strength of this one title, I had him mentally filed away as someone who writes about football, a subject I generally find even less interesting than the frustrated desires of heterosexual men (for which, see the previous post in this thread!).It turns out that this is actually an elegant little philosophical investigation into the problem of language and meaning, with echoes of classic existentialist texts like L'étranger. The central character, Bloch, experiences a kind of disconnection in which the relationship of objects to words, of words to abstract meanings, of events and statements to each other, are all destabilised and put into question. Football does come into the story at a couple of points, most crucially in the closing scene, but it isn't really a football story. There's a lot of insistence on the detail of ordinary things: what the world looks like when you're a little bit disconnected from it, and Handke maintains a very flat, undemonstrative style, in which apparently minor things, like a coin falling out of a pocket, are treated with as much weight as extreme acts of violence. I think I would find this pretentious in a longer book, but in a short novella like this I found it an interestingly different way of looking at things. It obviously wasn't Handke's main aim to create a historical snapshot of life in a small community in southern Austria at the end of the sixties, but reading the book 45 years on, the degree of observation of everyday things that comes out of the peculiar narrative style is also very interesting from that point of view.
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LibraryThing member DinoReader
Kafka's Trial begins with the protagonist's arrest and Camus's The Stranger with the death of the protagonist's mother; both events that the reader can trust with certainty.
Handke begins with the protagonist interpreting the actions of his fellow workers to mean he was fired and as a result,
It's almost like a bizarre reversal of Bukowski's (later written) Post Office beginning that it all started as a mistake.
There are so many other good and insightful reviews of what follows; how it relates to post-war Europe and Austria in particular, the linguistic theories of the time and deconstructionism, that I am not going to re-write them but suggest that anyone interested in this novel look at those reviews.
Never forget that it begins with what may be a mistaken interpretation of other's actions. It examines the position, importance and meaning of persons disconnected.
Handke begins with the protagonist interpreting the actions of his fellow workers to mean he was fired and as a result,
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abandoning his employment. The protagonist's belief in his discharge motivates all of the novel but it is not at all clear that his interpretation was correct. It's almost like a bizarre reversal of Bukowski's (later written) Post Office beginning that it all started as a mistake.
There are so many other good and insightful reviews of what follows; how it relates to post-war Europe and Austria in particular, the linguistic theories of the time and deconstructionism, that I am not going to re-write them but suggest that anyone interested in this novel look at those reviews.
Never forget that it begins with what may be a mistaken interpretation of other's actions. It examines the position, importance and meaning of persons disconnected.
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LibraryThing member icolford
This short novel, the first of Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, tells the story of Joseph Bloch, a soccer goalie turned construction worker, who in the opening scene, under the belief that he has been fired, leaves the job site in Vienna where he has been working and embarks upon a
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rambling and apparently senseless journey into Austria's border region. The reader views Bloch's actions and shares his perceptions through the prism of a narrative perspective that filters out all emotional responses. Indeed, Bloch seems incapable of empathy and spends his time observing and interacting with others, but at a surreal distance. At an early point in his wanderings he befriends a young ticket seller at a cinema, spends the night with her, and then for no reason strangles her. His disengagement enables him to simply pick up his journey where he left off. The narrative that Handke weaves is dreamlike, puzzling, but undeniably absorbing. Bloch's tenuous grip on reality gives the story a creepy immediacy and seems to critique modern society with its suggestion that experience is fragmented and distorted by language. This important novel brought one of the foremost German-language writers of the post-war era to the attention of English-language readers. Anyone interested in 20th-century narrative fiction must read this book. Show Less
LibraryThing member Dreesie
I honestly expected this to be 133 pages of a goalie stressing out about a penalty kick. It was not that.
Instead, we have a goalie-turned-construction-worker. He has murdered a woman. And now we get 133 pages of his analyzing everything he is doing and everyone else is doing and even what things
Instead, we have a goalie-turned-construction-worker. He has murdered a woman. And now we get 133 pages of his analyzing everything he is doing and everyone else is doing and even what things
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are doing, as he leaves town and wonders if he will be caught. Despite the fact that he seems to either have some sort of social anxiety or more likely a more serious issue, no one around him behaves as though he is acting unusual. Despite the fact he is in some random town and is just hanging around with the residents. And when I say "analyzing" I mean "wonders why he picked something up and what others will think and does that umbrella being there mean something" analyzing. I found it tiring to read, but also unsettling and somewhat creepy. I didn't really like it, but I understand why others might. Show Less
LibraryThing member dimi777
I liked very much to book, I believe it's one of his best novels. His hero Bloch, an ex goalkeeper, jobless and divorced is walking at the streets of Vienna without any intention. Everything around is hostile and threatens him, even the words are hiding something evil and harmful. The objects
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around him are in deterioration, rotten or dead. Dead flies are everywhere even under the pillow, the dead butterflies at the castle, the dead boy in the water. It's a dying world, who doesn't accept him full of unreasonable violence . Bloch is wildly beat or attracts to people. Only at the cinema is escaping for a while from this sick environment reminding Kafka's novels. At the pick of this odyssey he kills the cashier of the cinema he uses to go, a young woman and escape at a village near the borders, but there he learns that there are minefields at the borders preventing people to cross them and everyday from the papers he is learning that the police is approaching him. Finally in this hostile world only art and beauty could offer some tranquility (cinema, paintings at the church). The translation in Greek from Alexandros Issaris is excellent, a very good book. Show Less
LibraryThing member edwinbcn
Like my book buying, my reading has always been impulsive, without a premeditated plan, but as my aim is now to finish reading what I already have (TBR) and haven't bought any large number of books since 2014, I decided to turn to Peter Handke. Due to the increasingly repressive Internet
In my mind, Handke's Langsame Heimkehr has always been a quintessential work. The observation of geology, of rocks, least involves subjectivity. The landscape, stripped from time, names, each detail having no greater importance than another, one pebble no greater significance than the other. Ultimately, we are detached from our surroundings. We can enter into a relation with our surroundings by caring. Depicting, turning observations into interpretations involves subjectivity, as shown in Handke's other early novel Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire.
Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter is a psychological novel. The murder by Bloch is mentioned as casually as any other detail, on his short journey. The murder is not the cause of his journey, it happens, casually, without intent, on the way. Bloch is an outsider. He has no fixed relations, neither to people, nor to any place. He is not only detached from his surroundings, but even from his own actions. In effect, the reader is disinclined to judge him for those actions. He never really seems a murderer, he isn't on the run.
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restrictions here, I had missed the news that Handke has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Peter Handke is one of my favourite authors, although I find his later work brooding and obscure, missing the brio of the earlier work. Last month, I read In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, and a volume of literary criticism about his early work by Rainer Nägele & Renate Vois (in Beck's series Autorenbuecher).In my mind, Handke's Langsame Heimkehr has always been a quintessential work. The observation of geology, of rocks, least involves subjectivity. The landscape, stripped from time, names, each detail having no greater importance than another, one pebble no greater significance than the other. Ultimately, we are detached from our surroundings. We can enter into a relation with our surroundings by caring. Depicting, turning observations into interpretations involves subjectivity, as shown in Handke's other early novel Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire.
Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter is a psychological novel. The murder by Bloch is mentioned as casually as any other detail, on his short journey. The murder is not the cause of his journey, it happens, casually, without intent, on the way. Bloch is an outsider. He has no fixed relations, neither to people, nor to any place. He is not only detached from his surroundings, but even from his own actions. In effect, the reader is disinclined to judge him for those actions. He never really seems a murderer, he isn't on the run.
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LibraryThing member et.carole
This book is efficient and ugly in style. Handke, a German author who published The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick in the 1970s. Its staccato narration, a stream of consciousness complete with aborted thoughts and sudden interjection of sensory details, makes this novella a textbook example By page 20, Handke’s main character, Bloch, has strangled a woman, and the rest of the book spirals through his mental states, eccentrically orbiting the themes of justice, alarm, and the context of human behavior. The abrupt style of prose, a very intimate third person narration consisting almost entirely of simple subject-verb-noun sentences, fits this analysis of character well.
The efficiency of Goalie’s Anxiety is in its comparison of Bloch’s sensations to what we would consider normal. There is a constant exchange between what Bloch is doing and what he thinks he should be doing or saying, providing a critique of social interaction by viewing it slightly askew. Though I can’t say it was enjoyable to read, and in fact took me three different efforts to gather enough motivation to finish, it was more effectively thought-provoking because of this lack of fluidity.
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of the avant-garde movement. The efficiency of Goalie’s Anxiety is in its comparison of Bloch’s sensations to what we would consider normal. There is a constant exchange between what Bloch is doing and what he thinks he should be doing or saying, providing a critique of social interaction by viewing it slightly askew. Though I can’t say it was enjoyable to read, and in fact took me three different efforts to gather enough motivation to finish, it was more effectively thought-provoking because of this lack of fluidity.
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LibraryThing member autumnesf
I really don't like reading books that have a voice of a mental person.
LibraryThing member proustitute
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
If anything, The Goalie... should draw comparisons to Kafka. Handke's use of time, disorientation, the limits of language and discourse, and also the uncanny sense of reality mirroring dreams (and vice versa) are much more indebted to Kafka than to Camus.
Bloch is a difficult character to follow, and Handke enjoys confusing the reader to mimic Bloch's own mental state. Some of the scenes are bafflingly nonsensical, while others play on puns and linguistic turns of phrases in unique ways. Here's a short example of the latter:
"Gradually, when he said something now, he himself reappeared in what he said. The landlady asked him to stay for lunch. Bloch, who had planned to stay at her place anyway, refused."
This is much more of a Kafkaesque refusal. An example of how lost in language Bloch is, but juxtaposed against a legalese in which he cannot share (thus emphasizing his isolation):
"The policemen, who made the usual remarks, nevertheless seemed to mean something entirely different by them; at least they purposely mispronounced phrases like 'got to remember' and 'take off' as 'goats you remember' and 'take-off' and, just as purposely, let their tongues slide over others, saying 'whitewash?' instead of 'why watch?' and 'closed, or' instead of 'close door.'"
There's something almost Lacanian in Handke's playful and yet deranged handling of language and alienation in this witty and puzzling book.
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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 comparisons to Kafka. Handke's use of time, disorientation, the limits of language and discourse, and also the uncanny sense of reality mirroring dreams (and vice versa) are much more indebted to Kafka than to Camus.
Bloch is a difficult character to follow, and Handke enjoys confusing the reader to mimic Bloch's own mental state. Some of the scenes are bafflingly nonsensical, while others play on puns and linguistic turns of phrases in unique ways. Here's a short example of the latter:
"Gradually, when he said something now, he himself reappeared in what he said. The landlady asked him to stay for lunch. Bloch, who had planned to stay at her place anyway, refused."
This is much more of a Kafkaesque refusal. An example of how lost in language Bloch is, but juxtaposed against a legalese in which he cannot share (thus emphasizing his isolation):
"The policemen, who made the usual remarks, nevertheless seemed to mean something entirely different by them; at least they purposely mispronounced phrases like 'got to remember' and 'take off' as 'goats you remember' and 'take-off' and, just as purposely, let their tongues slide over others, saying 'whitewash?' instead of 'why watch?' and 'closed, or' instead of 'close door.'"
There's something almost Lacanian in Handke's playful and yet deranged handling of language and alienation in this witty and puzzling book.
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Awards
Nobel Prize in Literature (2019)
Original publication date
1970 (Original German)