The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

by Peter Handke

Book Overview

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).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374531064
• ISBN13: 9780374531065
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A great page-turner; an unconventional novel.

An excellent psychography of the modern city dweller.An ordinary working man suddenly senses that all his world is falling apart. He "reacts" to this with apathy and the conduction of a murder that has no apparent motive; no attempt is made to rationalize it. All of a sudden, he is a murderer. He then goes on moving from place to place, looking without seeing, focusing on details rather than on meanings. He passively waits for what is to come, without really thinking about it. The ending is sublime...