The Skating Rink - Hardcover

Bolaño, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330510525 ISBN 13: 9780330510523

Publisher: Picador, 2010

Synopsis

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.

The story revolves around the beautiful figure skating champion Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of town. What he doesn’t tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds; but such a betrayal is only the beginning and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene . . .

Told in short suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators – a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered, yet still romantic, itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur – The Skating Rink is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.

‘This short exquisite novel . . . manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing.’ New York Times

‘Bolaño writes with such elegance, verve and style and is immensely readable’ Guardian

‘His fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Bolaño has come close to re-imagining the novel’ Independent

‘His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction’ Sunday Times

‘Bolaño has proved [literature] can do anything’ Scotsman

‘[Bolaño] made each book more ambitious so that it will take us many years to come to terms with his vast achievement’ Colm Tóibín

‘He has the natural storyteller’s gift – but more important, he has the power to lend an extraordinary glamour to the activities of making love and making poetry’ Edmund White

‘Bolaño was one of those rare writers who write for a future time, and we, especially we in the Anglophone world, have only begun to appreciate his strange, oblique genius’ John Banville

‘Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño’ Sunday Times

‘It’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius’ Washington Post

‘Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of vision on the world’ Guardian

About this title

Product Description

A spellbinding, sui generis, detective fiction focusing on the swirling vortex of sex, death, and intrigue surrounding a beautiful Spanish figure skating champion

Review

'Roberto Bolano's novels are tales of the unexpected. Whether the scale is epic, as in his posthumously published masterpiece 2666, or intimate, as in this novel, he offers a unique, multilayered and quirky perspective on contemporary life.' --Daily Mail

`A fascinating insight into this extraordinary writer's creative process... The typical Bolaño influences are all here - Perec and Calvino, Kafka and Borges - but already there is the uniquely arresting voice that we find in the later novels, as well as the densely suggestive imagery and titillating genre-leaping. With its cast of vagabonds and exiles, its interwoven narrative voices and revelation of the currents of violence that run through society, The Skating Rink contains much of what makes late Bolaño great.' --New Statesman

'Elegant, elusive and amusing, this novel is more than capable of standing alongside the rest of Bolaño's work, and both long-time fans and author's writing and those coming to it fresh will find much move.' --Daily Telegraph

'A sizzling cocktail of sex, death and obsession set on the Costa Brava.' --The Times

'The Skating Rink is gripping, easy to read, sometimes funny and extraordinarily romantic... High Praise.' --Independent on Sunday

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0330510525
• ISBN 13: 9780330510523
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192