The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
by Peter Handke
Summary
Joseph Bloch is a former professional goalkeeper working an ordinary construction job when, in the novel's opening pages, he is dismissed, apparently for nothing more than showing up late, and walks away from the site convinced everyone around him is silently accusing him of something. Peter Handke follows Bloch through Vienna over the following days in flat, exact, almost clinical prose, tracking what he notices rather than what he feels, until that noticing itself starts to seem like the real subject: door handles, newspaper headlines, the particular sound a coin makes on a counter, all rendered with the same neutral attention regardless of how ordinary or threatening they actually are.
Bloch picks up a cinema cashier, spends the night with her, and kills her the next morning, an act the novel narrates with the same detached precision it gives to everything else, offering no clear motive and no moment of crisis that would make the killing legible as the climax of a plot. He then drifts to a small town near the Austrian border, waiting, watching, increasingly unable to trust that words mean what they are supposed to mean, a breakdown in language itself that Handke renders as inseparable from Bloch's unraveling perception of the world around him.
The novel ends at a village football match, where Bloch explains to a stranger what a goalkeeper goes through at a penalty kick, trying to read the striker's body for which way the ball will go; the kick is taken, the keeper stands still, and the ball goes straight into his hands. Handke is not writing a crime novel in any conventional sense; the murder is almost incidental to a book more interested in a mind coming apart than in a case being solved. It suits a reader curious about a famously spare, unsettling short novel, one willing to accept that the crime here is never really the point.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Peter Handke the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, published in German in 1970 as Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter and in English translation by Michael Roloff two years later, is the novel most responsible for Handke's early reputation, well before the Nobel arrived decades later, and it became a 1972 film directed by Wim Wenders.
The 2019 award proved the most openly protested Nobel literature prize in years. Handke had spoken at Slobodan Milošević's funeral in 2006 and had previously expressed views on the breakup of Yugoslavia that many read as minimizing the era's atrocities, and several countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo among them, boycotted the December ceremony in Stockholm in response. Handke's publisher later said that Handke had, separately, called the Srebrenica massacre the worst crime against humanity in Europe since the Second World War.