The Goalie's Anxiety At The Penalty Kick

The novel chronicles the self-destruction of a former soccer goalie who has become a construction worker. This troubled man has drifted around a town in an Austrian border after his unthinkable murder of a movie cashier he has pursued.

The author, Peter Handke, who, for his body of work, wins this year’s Kafka Prize, “writes in a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world” (Bill Marx, The Boston Sunday Globe); I agree. The narrative, although at times fractured, flows in a way that one, without much struggle, can follow what’s going on. But, sometimes, what’s going doesn’t make any sense (to me). Maybe that’s the idea. I’m not sure. And the ending: huh?

{August 7, 2009}