A Language Barrier: thoughts on "The Goalie's Anxiety..."

I had a conversation with one of my clients on Wednesday (after the beginning discussion of Handke and "Goalie." I had previously told her about The Sorrows of Young Werther, however, in this conversation I found myself taking an enormous amount of time to say absolutely nothing. I could NOT find a way to convey to her the feeling and tone of Handke's writing that told the story. I tried to tell her of the depersonalization of the reader herself (me) in reading the depersonalization of Bloch himself. I tried to convey the structure of the sentences. I tried to explain how Handke narrates the mundanity of each action, observation or thought in a way that leaves you feeling empty and upended inside. I attempted to describe the slow emergence of Bloch's awareness with the present leading up to the conclusion...

She is very well-read, my client, and so she continued to give me back words and phrases in the effort to grasp what I was trying to tell her. All of them MISSED! MISSED! The longer this went on, the more I became aware of just how brilliant this work of Handke's is; how skillfully he writes about language so that we cannot describe it but only experience what it is for ourselves.

And that was the conclusion we both reached. I wrote the title for her on a sticky note at the end of our appointment.