Dopo qualche tempo Bloch notò che lei parlava già come di cose proprie delle cose di cui lui le aveva appena raccontato, mentre invece lui, quando menzionava qualcosa di cui lei aveva appena parlato, ogni volta si limitava o a citare cautamente lei, oppure, non appena ne parlava con parole proprie, a premettervi sempre un estraniante e distanziante «questo» o «questa», quasi temesse di mescolare le sue faccende con le proprie.
(15)

Tutto ciò che vedeva era delimitato nel modo più insopportabile.
...
A ciascuna visione di un oggetto seguiva subito la parola. La sedia, l’attaccapanni, la chiave.
(42)

Potrebbe trattarsi del limite concessoci dalla gettatezza:

La noia profonda che si insinua serpeggiando nelle profondità della nostra esistenza come nebbia silenziosa, stringe insieme tutte le cose, gli uomini e l’individuo stesso con esse, in una singolare indifferenza. Questa è la noia che rivela l’essente nella sua totalità.
Heidegger, Che cos’è la metafisica?, pp. 16-17

( )

This slim book seems to draw readymade comparisons to Camus's L'Étranger, which I think is a very poor way to approach Handke's novella. While both texts deal with a man in an existential crisis and while there are murders, the similarities end there. Camus is concerned with the dissolution of a specific kind of French masculine identity; Handke's subject matter here is analogous, but this is a text very rooted in Austrian anxieties in the late-1960s.

If anything, The Goalie... should draw comparisons to Kafka. Handke's use of time, disorientation, the limits of language and discourse, and also the uncanny sense of reality mirroring dreams (and vice versa) are much more indebted to Kafka than to Camus.

Bloch is a difficult character to follow, and Handke enjoys confusing the reader to mimic Bloch's own mental state. Some of the scenes are bafflingly nonsensical, while others play on puns and linguistic turns of phrases in unique ways. Here's a short example of the latter:

"Gradually, when he said something now, he himself reappeared in what he said. The landlady asked him to stay for lunch. Bloch, who had planned to stay at her place anyway, refused."

This is much more of a Kafkaesque refusal. An example of how lost in language Bloch is, but juxtaposed against a legalese in which he cannot share (thus emphasizing his isolation):

"The policemen, who made the usual remarks, nevertheless seemed to mean something entirely different by them; at least they purposely mispronounced phrases like 'got to remember' and 'take off' as 'goats you remember' and 'take-off' and, just as purposely, let their tongues slide over others, saying 'whitewash?' instead of 'why watch?' and 'closed, or' instead of 'close door.'"

There's something almost Lacanian in Handke's playful and yet deranged handling of language and alienation in this witty and puzzling book. ( )

I really don't like reading books that have a voice of a mental person. ( )

This book is efficient and ugly in style. Handke, a German author who published The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick in the 1970s. Its staccato narration, a stream of consciousness complete with aborted thoughts and sudden interjection of sensory details, makes this novella a textbook example of the avant-garde movement. By page 20, Handke’s main character, Bloch, has strangled a woman, and the rest of the book spirals through his mental states, eccentrically orbiting the themes of justice, alarm, and the context of human behavior. The abrupt style of prose, a very intimate third person narration consisting almost entirely of simple subject-verb-noun sentences, fits this analysis of character well.
The efficiency of Goalie’s Anxiety is in its comparison of Bloch’s sensations to what we would consider normal. There is a constant exchange between what Bloch is doing and what he thinks he should be doing or saying, providing a critique of social interaction by viewing it slightly askew. Though I can’t say it was enjoyable to read, and in fact took me three different efforts to gather enough motivation to finish, it was more effectively thought-provoking because of this lack of fluidity. ( )

Like my book buying, my reading has always been impulsive, without a premeditated plan, but as my aim is now to finish reading what I already have (TBR) and haven't bought any large number of books since 2014, I decided to turn to Peter Handke. Due to the increasingly repressive Internet restrictions here, I had missed the news that Handke has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Peter Handke is one of my favourite authors, although I find his later work brooding and obscure, missing the brio of the earlier work. Last month, I read In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, and a volume of literary criticism about his early work by Rainer Nägele & Renate Vois (in Beck's series Autorenbuecher).

In my mind, Handke's Langsame Heimkehr has always been a quintessential work. The observation of geology, of rocks, least involves subjectivity. The landscape, stripped from time, names, each detail having no greater importance than another, one pebble no greater significance than the other. Ultimately, we are detached from our surroundings. We can enter into a relation with our surroundings by caring. Depicting, turning observations into interpretations involves subjectivity, as shown in Handke's other early novel Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire.

Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter is a psychological novel. The murder by Bloch is mentioned as casually as any other detail, on his short journey. The murder is not the cause of his journey, it happens, casually, without intent, on the way. Bloch is an outsider. He has no fixed relations, neither to people, nor to any place. He is not only detached from his surroundings, but even from his own actions. In effect, the reader is disinclined to judge him for those actions. He never really seems a murderer, he isn't on the run. ( )