The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Bloch’s Disconnection

Josef Bloch is fired—or perhaps he simply walks out, the novel is not sure—and begins to drift through Vienna. What distinguishes his experience from ordinary aimlessness is the quality of his perception: Bloch notices the wrong things. He observes the color of a cashier’s sweater rather than her face, registers the brand name on a truck rather than the truck’s cargo, fixates on a physical detail rather than the social interaction in which that detail is embedded. The world reaches him as a stream of disconnected signs, and the connections between those signs and their meanings have quietly loosened.

Handke renders this condition not through interior monologue or philosophical reflection but through the surface of Bloch’s perception. We experience his alienation as readers in the same way Bloch experiences it: things seem slightly wrong, the usual connections between perception and meaning fail to form, the world presents itself as a collection of surfaces without depths. This phenomenological precision is the novel’s great achievement: Handke does not explain alienation; he induces it.

The reading experience is therefore genuinely unsettling. Bloch’s encounters with waiters, shop assistants, and strangers all have a quality of wrongness that the reader feels before being able to articulate. The woman he picks up and sleeps with is presented with the same quality of surface description: we know her hair, her voice, the way she moves, but nothing connects. The killing, when it comes, is the logical extension of this disconnection—an act that happens without the connecting tissue of motive or psychology, because that connecting tissue has dissolved.

The Crime Without Motive

Bloch kills the woman in the morning, after staying the night, and leaves. He does not know why he did it, and Handke’s novel does not tell us. This absence of motive is the text’s central philosophical gesture. Conventional crime fiction locates violence in psychology—in jealousy, greed, revenge—which means locating it in a web of meaning. Bloch’s killing refuses this location. It is not nihilistic (he does not want the world to be meaningless) but symptomatic: the act of a person for whom the usual connections between intention and action have stopped functioning.

The flight to the border town that follows is rendered with the same perceptual flatness as the Vienna section. Bloch watches the locals, hangs around the inn, reads newspaper accounts of a search for a missing schoolgirl that may or may not be connected to his own crime, and thinks about football. His behavior is neither guilty nor carefree—it is the behavior of someone for whom the moral categories that structure behavior have become inaccessible. He knows he has done something; he cannot feel that he has.

This may be Handke’s most disturbing insight: that alienation is not a dramatic condition but a quiet one. Bloch does not suffer; he drifts. The horror is precisely the absence of the horror he should be experiencing.

The Penalty Kick

The novel’s title, and its closing image, is the penalty kick in football: the moment when the goalkeeper must dive left or right before the kick is taken, committing to a direction without information, in pure anticipation. The goalkeeper who thinks too much, who waits for evidence before committing, will be too late. He must choose, under conditions of radical uncertainty, with no rational basis for choice.

Handke uses this image as a figure for Bloch’s entire existential situation—and, by extension, for the human situation as he understands it. We act before we know; we commit before we understand; we choose directions in the absence of the information that might justify choice. The difference between the goalkeeper and Bloch is that the goalkeeper’s irreducible uncertainty is contained within a game that provides context and meaning. Bloch’s irreducible uncertainty is his entire life.

The novel ends with Bloch watching a penalty kick. The goalie guesses right. The connection between guess and outcome does not constitute knowledge—but it looks, from the outside, like success.

Handke, Language, and the Nobel Controversy

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick appeared in German in 1970 as Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, when Peter Handke was still in his twenties and already notorious in the German-speaking world as a provocateur who had denounced the literary establishment for its complacency. His early career was built on assaults on conventional realism—the anti-play Offending the Audience, the language experiments that treated speech itself as the subject—and this novel channels that obsession into narrative form. The book’s true protagonist is not Bloch but language: the way words attach to things, the way that attachment can come loose, the way a mind that has lost the connection between sign and meaning slides toward catastrophe. Handke would go on to a long and varied career, including the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and the wrenching memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. In 2019 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award shadowed by furious controversy over his sympathetic statements about Serbia and Slobodan Milošević during the Balkan wars—a reminder that the writer who rendered moral numbness so precisely in fiction would later face accusations of it in life.

Wenders, Cinema, and How to Read It

Wim Wenders adapted the novel into a film in 1972, his feature debut, and the pairing is no accident: Handke’s prose already works like a camera, recording surfaces with a deliberate refusal of interpretive depth. Bloch’s perceptions arrive as a sequence of framed images—a name on a sign, the colour of an object, a gesture detached from its context—and the reader, like a viewer, is left to supply or fail to supply the meaning. This cinematic flatness is the key to reading the book well. Newcomers should not approach it as a thriller despite its murder-and-flight plot, nor search for the psychological motive it deliberately withholds; the frustration that approach produces is precisely what Handke wants to expose. Read instead for the texture of perception itself, for the slow dread of watching a consciousness come unmoored from the world. At 144 pages it is the most accessible door into Handke’s difficult body of work, best read slowly and twice—once for the plot’s surface, once for the disintegration happening beneath it.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Handke’s most immediately gripping novel, and the best introduction to his fiction. The penalty kick metaphor alone is worth the price of admission.