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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.
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Based on a critical analysis, it certainly deserves five stars, and not four according to my vote. One can perceive the literal abyss in which Roberto Bolaño lived. The narrative is full of flashbacks. According to the prologue, within the first 60 pages, I had already detected three murderers, whereas to encounter the first mention of a stab wound to the back, one had to reach page sixty-six. […] Only later did I get the impression that I was reading an obsession of the writer.
This second book was not one of his best. It remained unknown for many years. It gently touches upon themes ranging from a simple business to politics, but it also deals with facets of misery or moments of pleasure, such as the 30 cm penis with which a character fucked his wife.
Those who recount the events of the story are a Chilean, a Spaniard, and a Mexican; in reality, the book is almost a monologue, as it is always Roberto Bolaño who speaks or writes. The Chilean poet is immersed in a writing style full of details. He frequently gets lost in the same circumstances: three versions of a crime. The protagonists revolve inside an abandoned mansion, around an illegally constructed ice rink. The good thing is that, by having written three versions of the crime, the reader can gain a retrospective vision.