Goalie is a manic noir, a Touch of Evil in the Austrian hinterland, it is breathless and yet sober—we follow a former footballer as he’s sacked from his construction job and begins a peripatetic towards meaning, though the layers fall away and language becomes so much dust. A curt wind arrives to scatter, motivation is just another accessory, the reptilian protagonist isn’t fleeing as much as refining. A local missing child reveals another fissure but the goalkeeper much like the reader can’t pause for either ceremony or contemplation. This story will end.

I read this on a flight from Frankfurt to Belgrade. I was sitting next to an asshole. He made an elderly guy change seats. Justice sometimes appears to be a rhetorical device, a philosophical ideal to balance the scales.