The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

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 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).

Praise

“Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde, denouncing all social, psychological and historical categories of experience as species of linguistic fraud. But [he] has aged well and now . . . is regarded as one of the most important writers in German.” —Richard Locke, The New York Times

About the Author(s)

Peter Handke

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His most recent novel is Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (FSG, 2007).

photo: Lillian Birnbaum