THE SKATING RINK - ROBERTO BOLAÑO

I’ve read a lot of Bolaño, I recalled, reading the short bibliography at the start of this book and mentally checking off a bunch of titles. Is he the modern (though he is dead) author who’s work I’ve read the most of? Does that make him my favorite? It feels bad that I’ve never/can’t read his work in Spanish. Will I ever rectify this? What if I didn’t like it then? Sounds like the plot of a Bolaño book, albeit a short one. The Skating Rink doesn’t have translation but it has many of the other Bolaño motifs. It’s got young, romantic, beleaguered poets, it’s got violence, it’s got sexual violence against women, it’s got South American’s living abroad. It’s got people living on a beach in Spain, it’s told from multiple narrators as a sort of oral history. It also includes the beautiful imagine of a dilapidated beach mansion with a brand new ice rink in the middle of it, with only a single mysterious young woman practicing on it. And this passage, “From that vantage point, I had a panoramic view of what looked like a labyrinth with a frozen center, marked by a black hole: the body.” That might be the single most Bolañic image in all his work. 8 rinks.