Customer Reviews

The Skating Rink

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

I will admit that I am not a reader of crime fiction or detective novels. They're intriguing, but it was just never my scene. Not to say The Skating Rink is that much of a detective novel in the first place. As suggested by Giles Harvey of the New York Review of Books (in an excellent piece in The National), the short novel leaves the reader with more questions than answers. But that's to be expected by now, right?

The story revolves around a mysterious Spanish seaside town Z (close to Y and just a drive away from Z, as it turns out). It is told through the eyes of three men - Remo Morán, an artist and business owner; Enric Rosquelles, a fat, wary and arrogant employee of the town's first socialist mayor Pilar; and Gaspar Heredia, a vagabond and poet who gets a job at a campground thanks to his old friend, Remo Morán - and culminates with, what else?, murder! That it is also a love story and one of the first pieces of prose from Bolaño (published in 1993 as La piesta de hielo) adds layers to an already fascinating character study and mystery.

Like anyone who had fallen (or been tricked) to love Roberto Bolaño over the years (I myself discovered him in translation, in 2006, three years after his death, reading By Night In Chile, Distant Star and Last Evenings on Earth back to back) will recognize the early contributions that he would perfect in his two masterpieces, The Savage Detectives and 2666. His mixture of the innane and mercurial and violent is mesmerizing. The way Z unfolds as Gaspar chased Caridad, his descriptions of the Palacio Benvingut ("labyrintine, chaotic, indecisive...") where the murder takes places, or his creation of the beautiful figure skater, Nuria Martí.

While others will talk about the plot, the motifs (the dense, rolling fog...), I was intrigued because I couldn't pinpoint Bolaño himself in the story. This may seem odd, but even without his doppleganger Arturo Belano (of Savage Detective fame), Roberto is always present in his often deeply personal stories based upon reflections on his own life. Most will compare Bolaño immediately to Heredia. Both came from Mexico to Spain and Bolaño spent years working the overnight shift at a campground. The case is also strong in Remo Morán's favor. Rosquelles, when musing about Remo's ex-wife, comments that she named their son some god awful Indian name (his name was Iñaki in the novel, but Bolaño's real son's name is Lautaro). Bolaño (just read 2666) also had a desire to be a detective, which he echoes through Moran:

"Sometimes in the mornings, when I'm having breakfast on my own, I think I would have loved to be a detective. I'm pretty observant, and I can reason deductively, and I'm a keen reader of crime fiction. If that's any use... which it isn't... Anyway, as Hans Henny Jahn, I think, once wrote: if you find a murder victim, better brace yourself, because the bodies will soon be coming thick and fast..."

Also, when thinking about the first time he'd seen a corpse, he responded:

"The first time was in Chile, in Concepción, the capital of the south. I was looking out the big window of the gymnasium where I was imprisoned along with about a hundred other people: it was a November night in 1973, the moon was full, and in the courtyard I saw a fat guy surrounded by a ring of police detectives...

We know, from Bolaño and his characters in multiple stories, that he was there in 1973 when Salvador Allende was overthrow by General Augusto Pinochet. Bolaño was among those arrested and escaped torture and a certain death when he met soldiers he'd gone to school with who helped him escape.

For Harvey:

"In any case, the real strength of the book isn't to be found in its plot. The problem with most mystery novels is that there aren't any mysteries in them, only secrets...Just as the novel is about to enter its final phase, and the shotguns brandished in the first act seem poised to go off, Morán knowingly echoes Borges's knowing remark about the detective story as a genre based on the fictitious notion that "a crime is solved by abstract reasoning and not by informants or by carelessness on the part of the criminals"

Bolaño seems to have split himself into multiple forms for The Skating Rink, which bristles with self-confidence and an honesty shrouded by the machinations of life. What Bolaño may have put of himself in the detestable, but intriguing Enric Rosquelles, will remain open for debate. That the novel continues to enhance his stature in the English speaking world is not. "The more you read him," writes Harvey one last time, "however, the more you come to savour the welts and infelicities, the gaping narrative holes and peculiar detours: you realise that Bolaño is turning you into a new kind of reader. Or, as Moran puts it on the opening page of The Skating Rink, describing his first encounter with Heredia, back in the distant Mexico City of their youth: `his voice seemed to be conjuring lawless territories, where anything was possible'."

And having read Monsieur Pain (to be released in January) and Between Parantheses (next year) in Spanish, anything is still possible.

"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.

... 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.

Anyone who has enjoyed the roman durs works of George Simenon will be entranced by this early Bolano "mystery" novel. Filled with atmosphere, subtlety, and thoroughly worked out characters, this well plotted work weaves three separate narratives together into a complex tale of modern-day alienation, unfulfilled sexual yearning, political corruption, and murder. There is no question of Bolano's literary stature as he uses language to wide effect, creating settings that shock and intrigue and characters that irritate and fascinate all at once. The three narratives skate around one another and come together remarkably, reminding me in structure of Mario Vargas Llosa's "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," among others that use this technique well. Although this work is just 182 pages in the New Directions translation of 2009, its cinematic cuts and speed make maximum use of every word and give the reader a dose of human malice and reality not soon forgotten. I highly recommend this work as a first read of Bolano or as an "entertainment," as Graham Greene called his novels, for seasoned Bolano veterans.

Another amazing piece of work by Bolano, and unlike 2666 this one didn't take a month and leave behind feelings of despair that lasted almost as long, this can be read easily in one afternoon and will mostly disturb you for even less.

Like many poets that write novels Bolano sentences and paragraphs can become small stories of their own, forcing the reader to revisit the lines a couple times before re-embarcing on the rest of read.

The Skating Rink is interesting in the way it looks at corruption that becomes a scandal, the motives are often desperate and indicative of human failings, moral hazards that we are waist deep into before we feel the current that pulls us with no hope of return to normalcy. Even though we know that the situation is out of control and will not end well our irrational mind will convince us that we are OK.

The "discovery" of Bolano with "The Savage Detectives" and the breakout 2666 published after his death is providing the means to translate more or Bolano's work, this is good news for readers every where.

Bolaño's style here is much sparer than in his later novels (most notably 2666 and The Savage Detectives, but also to a lesser extent in Nazi Literature in the Americas and Amulet). Where typically I am accustomed to seeing long poetic gesticulations over the simplest of events, objects, or people, in "The Skating Rink", Bolaño sticks to more concrete language. That being said, he also manages to assemble this gripping story in a way that flows as smooth as anything else he's written.

"The Skating Rink" reads like an extended version of one of Bolaño's short stories. He sticks to facts and concise descriptions of events. Even demonstrating the unimportance of superficial details, he simply names the primary setting for this novel 'Z' (a city). He probably could have done a similar thing with his three main characters (who also are our three narrators through this tale), and in fact he has done such a thing in many of his other short stories. All this trimming of unimportant details really serves to highlight the powerful atmosphere and action that Bolaño can create by focusing only on truly important elements. By his descriptions of the city Z, we get vivid photography of a town bathed in mystery and squalor. The campground and the Palacio Benvingut are built into fully imaginable locations.

I read this novel in a few hours--it's definitely difficult to put down. The allusions to "the murder" and "the body" increase and amass as the novel moves forward, building anticipation. The choice to alternate between three narrators serves to provide something of a 360-degree perspective on the event of the murder and the events leading up to it. Even though each narrator is not explicitly tied to the next, each shares a handful of contact points with the next (friends, relatives, colleagues), to the point that by the end of "The Skating Rink", it seems that all three narrators could be in the same room, telling the same story collectively. At the start they seem very separate, but by the end they are very close.

An enchanting experience, undoubtedly! One of Bolaño's shortest novels, but very easy to digest and very difficult to forget. There is less poetry and more description, more action. Definitely a must for fans of other Bolaño works.

I would consider myself a huge Roberto Bolano fan, and I did not encounter the Skating Rink until after I'd read 2666, the Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, Nazi Literature in the Americas, and Last Evenings on Earth. I was surprised, after having read it, to find out that it was one of his earliest forays into fiction writing, because I thought it was executed to near perfection.

Although I think that any reader would appreciate this book, I think that it might be especially good for beginners who feel truly hesitant to take on a writer like Roberto Bolano. Because Bolano not only eschews but openly scorns a lot of literary tradition, he can be intimidating for a first-time reader who's shown up to see what all the hype's about. But if that's you, and if you're looking for a place to start, then this might be a good one.

I say that for several reasons. First of all, the book is told in a pretty linear and straightforward narrative, which is more than can be said for some of his other books. And, although I think that Bolano's play with narrative is what makes some of his later works such great books, some people need to ease into that. The Skating Rink presents a start-to-finish story that the reader can easily follow, and won't have to worry about while trying to decide if they like this writer or not. It's also important that this linearly told story is a sort of mystery, as most of Bolano's work is informed not only by high literary establishment but by pulp as well, and detectives are present in almost all of his stories. So if you like what you see with the subtle mysteries, then this writer's ouevre is one with which you may wish to continue.

That's not where the similarities end, either. There are a lot of aspects of this book that come up in his other novels; The one that comes to mind most readily right now is the setting of the campground, and the character of the campground's night time watchman. This sort of scene comes up in a couple of his books, and is even cooler because Bolano himself worked such a job while he was struggling as a poet. They say all fiction is autobiographical, but with Bolano it's even moreso than many others.

I think The Skating Rink also captures a tame factor of the "what-the-f***" factor that goes along with Bolano's writing. It takes some of the strangest settings and somehow normalizes them, so that you grow accustomed to the bizarre nature of whatever it is that's taking place, or wherever it's taking place, until you're forced to step back and realize how strange the universe is. In the epigraph of 2666, Bolano includes a quote from Charles Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." Frankly, it says more about Bolano in a phrase than I can in a review, but to give you an idea: portions of this novel take place in an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of town in the rain, with multiple characters inside and a sort of web-like intricacy of who is aware of who else's presence.

My last piece of advice is to stick with it. Bolano can feel boring after the first couple pages, and you can begin to wonder why you're reading any of the stuff you're reading. But he is not so much a symbologically narrative guy as a gut feeling and utter reckoning type...the longer you read, the more the feeling of perverse alienation and dread seeps in. It's like looking at a Dali or watching Blue Velvet, it really is (sidenote: if you like David Lynch at all, I would be absolutely shocked if you didn't fall in love with Bolano). By the end, you will be obsessed, I promise.

And, if you like what you say, that means you should move on to some of the later works. This book really is a great introduction to the fiction writing of Roberto Bolano.

This publisher is really milking out this Bolano saga for all it's money. Too bad he's not around to spend some of his hard earned money and write more novels. At any rate, reading Bolano is always something to look forward to. This new publication in no exception. It was just simply a good read, and with all the laughs one comes to expect from Bolano. One gets a glimpse of what his life may have been like when he worked at the campground as a security guard. If only there more writers as talented as Bolano writing today!

The structure of The Skating Rink is yet another example of Bolano's use of form to enhance or elevate the substance of the story. Earlier examples include By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives, and 2666. The alternating dialogs of the various protagonists in The Skating Rink occasionally fold the narrative back on itself but never interfere with or retard the advancement of the tale. The structure and interrelating stories of 2666 were mind-blowing and so impressively knit together as to totally obviate the length of the volume. Although The Skating Rink on initial reading seems a much more modest undertaking, it is, nevertheless, another fine addition to the catalog of a protean wordsmith and master story teller.