Two Book Tuesday: Reading and Anxiety

Over the last week, I managed to read two short books: Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970) and James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (2026). First, I get that Handke is a controversial figure and I do regret vaguely being interested in his novel. I would not assign it in class or read it again, but I do think that it is a book worth reading. Handke’s narrative style in this novel is deadpan and creates an intense sense of alienation from the world. The main character is unemployed, emotionally detached, and desperately seeking a connection with the world. In a bizarre and seemingly irrational attempt to manage this feeling, he murders a woman who slept with him and then heads to a border town where an ex-girl friend lives and loiters there for a series of days. The narrative is full of things and the main character’s body is always present. He gets drunk, he gets tired, he observes things, and he…

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