The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
A former goalkeeper takes a glance from the site foreman as notice that he has been dismissed, walks off the job and drifts through Vienna and then a village on the southern border, buying newspapers, sitting in cinemas, talking to people who no longer quite reach him. Objects and words come apart in his perception until reading a sentence and reading a room become the same failing operation, and the police bulletins in the paper begin to describe him. Handke uses the outward shape of a crime story to conduct a study of what happens when language stops holding the world together.
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