A Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick
I bought this from a second hand book shop in Balham the day England lost 4 – 1 to Germany in the Football World Cup. The shop keeper laughed out loud when he saw the title of the book. I turned to my friend who had taken me to the book shop and made a face as if to say, “get a load of this guy,” (although maybe not because I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase). My friend asked me where I had heard of the book, after he read the synopsis on the back. Later we would discuss how the cover looks like the cover of an Adrian Mole book. It is a 1978 paperback edition, published by Quartet. As far as I can make out from their website, they have not reprinted it*.
On the back, the book is compared to L’Etranger. It’s an easy comparison to make. Both are short novels that deal with existential alienation and murder. But whereas Camus seems concerned with motive and consequence as well as alienation, Handke seems solely preoccupied with the emotional isolation of an ex-goal keeper, now murderer, Bloch. Bloch seems to have more in common with Michel Poiccard in Goddard’s A Bout De Souffle than Mersault.
Bloch seems to suffer from some sort of 'Depersonalisation Syndrome'. Handke combines Bloch’s inner thoughts and the third-person narration of the book to emphasise this. Here is an excerpt from towards the end of the books, where Handke makes use of Wingdings, or whatever the pre-Microsoft equivalent of Wingdings is:
“He repeated the look from left to right; this look seemed to him like reading. He saw a “wardrobe”, “then” “a” “waste-paper-basket”, “then” “a” “curtain”; while looking from right to left, however, he saw [chair], next to the [table].” etc...
* * *
The same day I bought the book, my friend and I went to a shop called Clapham Books. There was a shelf of Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series. My friend made a comment which could have been, “Fucking love these.” I pointed to a copy of George Orwell’s Cigarette’s vs. Books and said “Yeah, this is really good.” Or something to that effect. He said, “I haven’t read this one.” I said, “No, I meant the cover,” as if that was what we were talking about all along. This moment has crossed my mind perhaps every day since then.
*Amazon tells me that Farrar Straus Giroux published the book in 2007
I bought this from a second hand book shop in Balham the day England lost 4 – 1 to Germany in the Football World Cup. The shop keeper laughed out loud when he saw the title of the book. I turned to my friend who had taken me to the book shop and made a face as if to say, “get a load of this guy,” (although maybe not because I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase). My friend asked me where I had heard of the book, after he read the synopsis on the back. Later we would discuss how the cover looks like the cover of an Adrian Mole book. It is a 1978 paperback edition, published by Quartet. As far as I can make out from their website, they have not reprinted it*.
On the back, the book is compared to L’Etranger. It’s an easy comparison to make. Both are short novels that deal with existential alienation and murder. But whereas Camus seems concerned with motive and consequence as well as alienation, Handke seems solely preoccupied with the emotional isolation of an ex-goal keeper, now murderer, Bloch. Bloch seems to have more in common with Michel Poiccard in Goddard’s A Bout De Souffle than Mersault.
Bloch seems to suffer from some sort of 'Depersonalisation Syndrome'. Handke combines Bloch’s inner thoughts and the third-person narration of the book to emphasise this. Here is an excerpt from towards the end of the books, where Handke makes use of Wingdings, or whatever the pre-Microsoft equivalent of Wingdings is:
“He repeated the look from left to right; this look seemed to him like reading. He saw a “wardrobe”, “then” “a” “waste-paper-basket”, “then” “a” “curtain”; while looking from right to left, however, he saw [chair], next to the [table].” etc...
* * *
The same day I bought the book, my friend and I went to a shop called Clapham Books. There was a shelf of Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series. My friend made a comment which could have been, “Fucking love these.” I pointed to a copy of George Orwell’s Cigarette’s vs. Books and said “Yeah, this is really good.” Or something to that effect. He said, “I haven’t read this one.” I said, “No, I meant the cover,” as if that was what we were talking about all along. This moment has crossed my mind perhaps every day since then.
*Amazon tells me that Farrar Straus Giroux published the book in 2007
As "goalie's" translator, who has given that book and Handke considerable thought since I did that work in the early 70s, let me say that you miss the import of the book and what it can do to you if you treat it to intepretations of that kind. What state of mind does the first paragraph put you in? At what point are no longer, say, dissociated? By the time that Bloch is back inside a football goal he is actually quite calm, but unaware that a cop behind is just about to arrest him. To give you a clue: Handke very carefully studied the linguistics of paranoid shizopherenia.
ReplyDeletesince handke is on your list - i would say there are nearly a dozen of his books and plays that are essential - here the portals to a lot of material of his and about him on the web:
http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/
the new HUB to all Handke-blogs
and all
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/
sites....
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Michael, Thank you for commenting and congratulations on your fine translation of 'Goalie...'
ReplyDeleteLet me say though that you miss the point of this post; that is, it is not to critique the work of 'Goalie...' (although it does do that to some extent), but to critique the ridiculousness of my own behaviour around other people... I guess? Lets just say it is not a review in the traditional sense.
I'm not entirely sure what point you are trying to make about me "miss[ing] the import of the book"; it seems that you re-iterate what I touched on about Handke's use of language. Your sentences seem quite disjointed though so it's hard for me to understand exactly what you mean.