HANDKE, Peter. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Translated by Michael Roloff. FIRST U.K. EDITION. Eyre Methuen. 1977
Half title. Orig. black cloth. Photographic d.w., unclipped; front panel sl. browned, evidence of price sticker removal from front flap. Bookplate of Felix Dennis on leading pastedown. A nice copy.
¶The first of Handke's novels to appear in English: the New York edition was published in 1972, coinciding with Wim Wenders's film adaptation. A bizarre novella about a murderer in an Austrian border town. While deserving of its frequent comparisons with Camus's L'Etranger, it is a twentieth-century classic in its own right. The scene in which the titular goalie explains to an acquaintance the futile second-guessing involved in attempting to save a penalty is somehow as illuminating and chilling as anything in Kafka or Ligotti. Handke was one of the 2019 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, provoking a degree of controversy.