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A review by juuhae
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
3.0
What can I even say about this book? Former goalie Josef Bloch thinks he got fired because his coworkers don't look at him when he enters the room; so he wanders around the city. This continues for the rest of the 100 pages. Somewhere at the beginning, he murders a girl who he followed home, but he never acknowledges his crime directly. It's unclear if he's even aware of it. Most of the book just describes mundane tasks and events, to which Bloch's mind connects seemingly random meanings. Overall, it seems like the story of a man who slowly goes insane.
To be fair, there was a very eerie tension lurking beneath the plain text. There also were strange things happening; like the death of a deaf child whose body Bloch finds floating in a creek. Towards the end, paper articles about the police looking for the girl's murderer appear, but it is never revealed if Bloch gets caught. A very strange book indeed, which I normally love, but this was just too contentless to be interesting for more than 100 pages. It's called "Erzählung" in german, kind of like the american short story but not really. I think it would have worked better if it really was a short story, 25 pages max.
To be fair, there was a very eerie tension lurking beneath the plain text. There also were strange things happening; like the death of a deaf child whose body Bloch finds floating in a creek. Towards the end, paper articles about the police looking for the girl's murderer appear, but it is never revealed if Bloch gets caught. A very strange book indeed, which I normally love, but this was just too contentless to be interesting for more than 100 pages. It's called "Erzählung" in german, kind of like the american short story but not really. I think it would have worked better if it really was a short story, 25 pages max.