Review of Bolano's The Skating Rink

The Abu Dhabi-based The National has one of the first reviews of Bolano’s The Skating Rink, which is coming out from New Directions later this year.

Giles Harvey’s raview spends a lot of time on Borges and Poe, detective fiction, and the creation of the reader of detective fiction, which is all quite interesting, and ties in nicely to this particular novel.

Like Death and the Compass, Bolaño’s latest novel to be translated into English (and his first to be published in the Spanish-speaking world, back in 1993), The Skating Rink is, at least in part, a parody of detective fiction – or, strictly speaking, of crime fiction, the meaner, sexier, more violent love child of the detective story and 20th-century America. The Skating Rink lavishes on the reader many of the pleasures typically associated with that genre – suspense, intrigue, the exhilarating spectacle of moral decay – while making it quite clear that such pleasures are by no means the full extent of what it has to offer; it fondles and flaunts its own artifice, using it to explore chaos, reality, experience.

There has been a murder in the small resort town of Z on the Costa Brava. Three men – all ardent, wayward, headstrong, although in other respects quite dissimilar – appear to be implicated in the crime. These men share between themselves the task of telling the book’s story, each narrating brief chapters in turn.

Sounds interesting, and the novel’s meandering opening line (“The first time I saw him, it was int he Calle Bucareli, in Mexico City, that is, back in the vague shifty territory of our adolescence, the province of hardened poets, on a night of heavy fog, which slowed the traffic and prompted conversations about that odd phenomenon, so rare in Mexico City at night, at least as far as I can remember.”) is delicious, but it’s this closing paragraph that sold me:

In Bolaño there is no such poise, burnish or masterful cerebration. Instead people are always flubbing their lines and missing their cues. In fact, there aren’t even any actual detectives in The Skating Rink. Morán, the reader of crime fiction, gets to play at detection: it’s he who finds the body and then, rather inadvertently, discovers who’s responsible. But the revelation reveals hardly anything. It just inaugurates another mystery. And then the book ends, less crime novel than shaggy dog story.

And now I know how I’m spending my weekend.