Synopses & Reviews
A hair-raising book that delivers Bolao"s signature mix of mordant wit and romantic tenderness, The Skating Rinkis both a crime and a love story. The story starts off with Gaspar Heredia '" writer, Mexican, illegal immigrant, and stand-in for Bolao himself '"who meets Remo Moran, a businessman who pulled himself up to wealth from his inauspicious beginnings as a stall vendor of cheap tourist souvenirs. Moran hires Heredia as night watchman for a campground Moran runs as a stopping ground for many illegal immigrants. Heredia, out of boredom, starts spying on Moran"s odd friends and accidentally stumbles across a skating rink built by a corrupt civil servant '" Enric Rosquelles: pompous, fat, squat and ugly '" who has diverted public funds to secretly build the rink on behalf of the love of his life: Mara, a young blonde babe whose abiding passion is to make it onto the Spanish Olympic ice-skating team and who, unbeknownst to Enric, is having a fling with Remo Moran, our successful businessman risen from cheap souvenirs. Alas, the discovery of Enric"s crimes leads to madcap blackmail, more crime, sex, intrigue '" and murder. Told in rotating narratives of the three men whose actions revolve around the young blonde skating babe and her dim-witted but strong-willed manipulations.
Set in the imaginary resort town of Z, north of Barcelona, Spain.
Review
"Darkly funny, but also tender and complex in the tenor of classic Bolaño novels." The Observer
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"A highly engaging novel of lyricism, menace and beauty." Emma Hagestadt The Independent
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Passion, mystery, seedy bars, and Bolaños Olympian irony are here, as always.The latest release in the series of highly masterful and literary translations by Chris Andrews…. Deserves to be read widely. --Rosemary Aud Franklin
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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
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One of the strangest mysteries...with its dark-summer heat that all but comes off the page. --Marilis Hornidge
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A world ... on the porous border between reality and dream, and that insidiously takes root in the reader's mind. --Chandrahas Choudhury
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A Book of the Year: The Skating Rink leavens the melancholy of exile with an interest in the uncanny and a knack for the surrealist image. --Siddhartha Deb
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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
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A stunning work of fiction. It is infused with a gritty poeticism and a unique worldview. --Don Sjoerdsma
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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
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"...like much of what [Bolano] wrote, leaves many new novels looking pretty bland." Anthony Cummins
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"...this Catalan drama sizzles with unrequited love and murderous ambition." Savannah ("Savvy") Jones SirReadaLot.org
Synopsis
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. "
Synopsis
Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, 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, 's short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: All of these questions are answered, and yet 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.
Synopsis
With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolaño’s The Skating Rinkis, 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 Rinkis 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.
Synopsis
"He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time." --Ilan Stavans,
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 Chris Andrews has translated many books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.