The skating rink

IN the apparently inexhaustible post-humous career of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, a significant second act will soon be upon us, leaving some readers to clap excitedly while others throw up their hands in submission: the large number of books by Bolaño already available is soon to double. In addition to the eight that have swiftly and ably arrived in translation in the six years since his death in 2003 at age 50, four new books by Bolaño are scheduled to appear in 2010 (two novels, two story collections) with three others promised for 2011. What's more, according to recent reports out of Spain, another two finished novels have been found among Bolaño's papers, as well as a sixth, unknown part of his already abundant 900-page novel "2666." While such a mountain of new material is bound to make literary hearts flutter, a little red flag waves at its summit: when it comes to publishing the dead, the best isn't often saved for last. Given the nearly uniform excellence of Bolaño's writing to date, it seems unlikely that any of the looming titles could equal the exceptional "By Night in Chile" (translated in 2003), "The Savage Detectives" (2007) or last year's "2666," which already compete for consideration as Bolaño's masterpiece. At the very least, readers yet to experience Bolaño's writing - its narrative variety and verve, its linguistic resourcefulness, its unusual combination of gravity and playfulness, brutality and tenderness - increasingly face the very practical problem of having to divine which book on the widening shelf of Bolaños should be read first. "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. The novel is made up of brief, alternating statements given by, we come to understand, three of the crime's more likely suspects. The voices belong to Remo Morán, a poet turned novelist and the levelheaded owner of tourist-oriented businesses in Z; Gaspar Heredia, a poet turned night watchman at Morán's campground and an old friend from Mexico City; and Enric Rosquelles, an arrogant, overweight psychologist who manages Z's social services department. Each speaks as if answering a detective's pointed questions, offering strong opinions of the other men. Of Rosquelles, Morán says: "Repulsive. A toy-size tyrant full of fears and obsessions, who thought he was the center of the world, when he was just a foul, pouting lard," while Rosquelles says of Morán that he "degraded, despoiled and defiled everything he touched. . . . He didn't fool me with that world-weary, seen-it-all manner of his. So he'd been through a war. So he'd been on TV a couple times. . . . And let me tell you a secret I discovered a long time ago: size is not everything." Rosquelles's preoccupation with Morán owes to their mutual fascination with the same beautiful woman: Nuria Martí. "All the world's adjectives," Rosquelles tells us of his first glimpse of her, "fell short of Nuria's luminous form." Rosquelles - whom the third narrator, Heredia, refers to as "the fat guy" - has no illusions that his body could attract Martí and uses his petty bureaucratic powers instead. A figure skater, Martí has recently been cut from the Spanish national team and has nowhere left to train. Rosquelles decides to funnel state funds into a secret project: an Olympic rink in the bowels of an abandoned palace. There, Martí trains, Rosquelles watches, Morán circles, Heredia spies, blood is spilled and the killer's face is, at last, revealed. Which, after all, is the least one should expect. What one does not expect, in Bolaño's brisk twisting of the genre, is that the three narrators could be so profoundly conjured. "I don't know, there was something about the guy that made him likable," Heredia says of Rosquelles. Heredia's "something" is what each of us has that no one else can see: a complex and imperfect heart. Whereas Denis Johnson, in his recent foray into hard-boiled genre fiction, "Nobody Move," managed an entertaining exercise in appropriation where bullets flew and feeling failed to materialize, Bolaño in "The Skating Rink" manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing. "Incomprehensibly," Morán tells us, "my eyes filled with tears and I felt alone and lost." The imperative to present the sources of such emotion remains a central feature in Bolaño's expanding shelf of astonishing fictions, the wellsprings of incomprehensible feeling that hide in even the most abject fool. Bolaño honors crime genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them. Wyatt Mason is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.

The late but posthumously hot Chilean novelist (who died in 2003, and all of whose novels are being translated into English, to considerable acclaim) is as challenging but intriguing as attested to in this newly translated novel as one of his obvious masters, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, who reigns over all modern Latin American letters. Over the course of one summer in a seaside Spanish resort town (called Z, in Bolaño's Kafkaesque sense of nonspecificity that, ironically, becomes the narrative's universality), three men face the common denominator in their quite disparate lives the beautiful championship skater Nuria and relate in alternating first-person accounts their experiences in how this selfish, enigmatic, spoiled young woman impacts lives all around her, and generally not to the good. In fact, the crisis of their lives that summer, of their invidual recollections, is the murder of a woman, whose body is found in the middle of Nuria's practice rink. The elements of murder mystery only cap do not define this satire on the human need for gratification, sexual and otherwise.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist