23/05/2026
An amazing, formally inventive novella from 1970. I was familiar with Wim Wender’s movie adaptation (which had the more elegantly translated title of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty). But Handke’s book is a totally different prospect.
The book follows sociopathic Joseph Bloch, an ex-professional goalkeeper, who at the start of the novel loses his job as a construction worker. He drifts listlessly around town for a few days before he murders a cinema cashier girl in cold blood. He goes on the run, hiding out in a small Austrian border town where an old girlfriend is living.
Bloch’s motivation is completely inscrutable. He reads the newspapers daily to gauge the progress of the police investigation. He reads that he left some American coins at the crime scene. He displays no remorse but the text hints at a sense of guilt by the sudden appearance through of nickels and dimes that slip out of his pockets, or roll under the bed.
That’s the minimal plot, but the book’s style is the thing. Told in a prosaic monotone, a litany of minutely observed details that follow Bloch’s visual perceptions of the world. This style charts his existential unraveling, his descent into madness.
His relationship to language becomes increasingly dysfunctional. “Every word needed an explanation.” He becomes unable to distinguish between the word and the thing itself, between the sign and the signifier. He is subsumed by “the pressure of words”.
He notices the world in minute details, such as the crescent shapes of finger nails in window putty, or the half chewed skins of spat-out grapes on the floor. But Bloch’s inability to interpret signs and events prevents him from organising hierarchies of meaning. Random objects and the actions of people and what they say to him are all one undistinguished miasma. The physical material of the world becomes one great experiential flow; he is both alienated from it and his own sense of self is totally consumed by it.
An incredible novella, I must read more Handke.
