The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

One of 2019 Nobel Laureate for Literature’s most important works, a spare and haunting novel of alienation

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 Handke’s use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys the dislocation and dej vu of modern twentieth-century life.