The Skating Rink (Hardcover)

~ Roberto Bolaño (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Review

A highly engaging novel of lyricism, menace and beauty. (James Yeh - The Faster Times )

Darkly funny, but also tender and complex in the tenor of classic Bolaño novels. (Savannah ("Savvy") Jones - SirReadaLot.org )

Lucid fury . . . is a pretty good description of Bolaño’s aesthetic. He is a novelist of voraciousness without sentiment, hardness to a fever pitch. (Todd Shy - San Francisco Chronicle )

One of the strangest mysteries...with its dark-summer heat that all but comes off the page. (Marilis Hornidge - The Lincoln County News )

Passion, mystery, seedy bars, and Bolaño''s Olympian irony are here, as always. (The Village Voice )

This short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far…Bolaño in The Skating Rink manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing. (Wyatt Mason - The New York Times Book Review )

When I read Bolaño, I think: everything is possible again....How he makes one laugh! The laughter of someone who just escaped being buried live, and suddenly remembers how badly she wants to live. (Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love )

Product Description

“He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time.” —Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.

A complex book, The Skating Rink’s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it’s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it’s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers. .

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1 edition (August 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217132
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217132
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,371 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very pleased., August 7, 2009

By	Dallas Fawson (Salt Lake City, Utah) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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I was worried about this novel for two reasons: I saw that this was written early in his career, and was afraid that he hadn't yet mastered his writing style. The other reason is that they'd already published so many of his novels, and I was worried they'd published all of his good ones first.
Luckily, I was not at all disappointed. While his writing style is certainly different (It's more straightforward, most notably because of the inclusion of a solid plot and lack of poetic ramblings) it's just as good. It was just as thrilling to read as his best novels, and in turn ranks as one of his best. While I didn't think it had quite the power of By Night in Chile, I think it was more powerful than Amulet and Distant Star. It also works well as a starting point for people who want to read Bolano.
It has all of the mystery, violence, politics and beauty we've come to expect in Bolano's writing, as well as many scenes that feel very personal.
If you've read and loved Bolano, you surely won't be disappointed by this novel. And if you haven't read him, this is on par with Last Evenings on Earth as an excellent starting place to get to know his dark beauty and black humor.
Also, in case you weren't sure, the official release date is August 28th, but you can order right now and get it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Skating Rink, August 14, 2009

By	Patrick King (NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The Skating Rink" was my third encounter with Roberto Bolaño, after 2666: A Novel and The Savage Detectives, and I have to say that I found it to be different but equally as engaging. To begin with, the novel is substantially shorter than both "2666" and "The Savage Detectives" but still retains the mystery and wonder present in those novels. It is definitely more of what I would call a straight-forward mystery (in Bolaño terms that is) and has a clear and defined course that meanders significantly less. It is inconventional in that it is presented from three different points of view and is told in a past tense where each of the narrators are fully aware of the nature of the crime, the victim and the criminal at the beginning, but the reader still has to wait until the end to get any sort of resolution. I was also very intrigued that the novel was able to achieve a great blending of a mystery novel and a work of literary fiction. While I did not enjoy it as much as "2666" or "The Savage Detectives," "The Skating Rink" was a good read and shows a different side to Bolaño that I was unaware of.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bolaño Learned to Write..., September 9, 2009

By	Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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... while working on this 'first' novel, The Skating Rink. That's a guess on my part; perhaps he knew where he was going and what his 'voice' would be from the start, but I don't think so. The Skating Rink begins as one kind of book, an awkwardly plotted 'crime' novel with a self-consciously literary narrative structure. The three narrators are plausible enough as characters but their narrative voices are not natural, not recognizably 'themselves.' This is especially so in the English translation, in which they have no syntactical fingerprints. I found myself wondering, as I read, how I would have reacted to the first half of The Skating Rink if I hadn't already read some of Bolaño's later novels. I might well have tossed it aside. In short, the first half - make that the first two-thirds - isn't very good. I doubt that I'd have recognized the 'promise' in it.

Those three narrators are all men, writing about their involvement with women. The women remain phantom obsessions in the men's minds. Two of the narrators are what Bolaño calls "hardened poets," a sub-species unknown in most northern climates but endemic to Bolaño's later writings as well. The third is a self-important obnoxious bureaucrat; Bolaño struggles, I think, to make this character psychologically credible. Someone will get murdered, readers are told early in the story, and all three narrators will be involved, but there isn't precisely a mystery. The murder occurs late in the book, and the victim isn't who one has been led to expect. The main action takes place in a sleazy beach town on the Catalan Costa Brava, where decomposition rules.

Social and individual decomposition would become Bolaño's overriding theme in his later books, along with despair and depravity. Don't expect beauty, joy, or lyricism in this or any other novel by Roberto Bolaño! Somewhere around two-thirds of the way through The Skating Rink a seismic shift occurs in Bolaño's style, and the characteristics of his mature writing begin to emerge: his sinister cynicism, his queasy indirectness, his nightmarish sense of impending horror, above all his terrifying moral ambiguity. Nothing is ever not subjective, not merely one mind's partial perception; every thought skates on the edge of madness. Even the eventual 'murderer's confession' seems doubtful, possibly only one illusion in one debauched and damaged mind.

On the other hand, and as a solid recommendation, The Skating Rink is a much 'easier' book than Bolaño's later novels. It's short, the plot exposition is forthright, the syntax is uncomplicated, and there are few of the obscure allusions to Latin American literature and history that make his work challenging for anglophone readers. Bolaño was a major talent, the most interesting Latin American writer since Julio Cortázar, and his premiere novel might well serve to teach Americans how to read him as effectively as it taught him how to write.