At times this felt irritating, with its obsessive flat narration of events, but the book grew on me more and more as it progressed over its very short length. Handke reads like a postmodern version of Hemingway and the novel has some echoes of Camus' The Stranger with its apparently senseless murder. It becomes really interesting as the protagonist, Bloch, starts to become more and more estranged from the world around him: he loses control over language, misinterprets gestures and can't count from the number one. At one point language breaks down into pictographic symbols and at various points the narration trails off into an ellipsis. For some reason it made me think a lot of Godard's À bout de souffle.