A phenomenally unusual three-way murder mystery.
With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolaño’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolaño, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, “declared, in all apparent seriousness, that what he would most like to have been was a homicide detective.”
Set in the seaside town of Z, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators, and revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. A ruined mansion, knife-wielding women, political corruption, sex, and jealousy all appear in this atmospheric chronicle of a single summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, businessmen, immigrants, bureaucrats, social workers, and drifters.
'Exquisite . . . another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. The Skating Rink manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing.' --Wyatt Mason
'There is much intensity at work, although The Skating Rink leavens the melancholy of exile with an interest in the uncanny and a knack for the surrealist image.' --Siddhartha Deb
'This is pure Bolano.'
'A highly engaging novel of lyricism, menace and beauty.' -- James Yeh
'Darkly funny, but also tender and complex in the tenor of classic Bolano novels'. -- Savannah ("Savvy") Jones
'Lucid fury . . . is a pretty good description of Bolano's aesthetic. He is a novelist of voraciousness without sentiment, hardness to a fever pitch.' -- Todd Shy
'One of the strangest mysteries...with its dark-summer heat that all but comes off the page.' -- Marilis Hornidge
'This short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far...Bolano in The Skating Rink manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing.' -- Wyatt Mason
'When I read Bolano, 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
About the Author
Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.
The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle Inclan Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work.
