Wyatt Mason Calls The Skating Rink a Masterpiece

And I agree. From Mason’s NYTimes review:

“The Skating Rink,” the only new Bolaño appearing this year, won’t make the decision any easier: this short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. Originally published in Spanish in 1993 and the first of Bolaño’s novels to see print, “The Skating Rink” could seem, in thumbnail, little more than a modest whodunit. A crime, the brutal murder of a woman, is committed in the Spanish seaside town of Z. As the corpse-and-culprit genre dictates, the novel establishes the sequence of events that sets the crime in motion and follows the bloody trail until, in the final pages, the killer’s surprising identity is revealed.

The first feature of “The Skating Rink” that elevates it above a forgettable police procedural is the memorable strategy Bolaño adopts to deliver the facts. Like his later, larger novel “The Savage Detectives,” which showcased some four dozen voices telling stories around two central characters, “The Skating Rink” is also told by a narrative choir, albeit a more intimate one.

I wouldn’t say The Skating Rink is on the level of Bolano’s later triumphs, but it is a strong book so it’s nice to see a critic of Mason’s stature coming out in favor of it.

I also noted the similarities to The Savage Detectives, although in my reading the nuances between voices were a lot more subtle in The Skating Rink than in Detectives.

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