Review of Peter Handke's "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

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.