The skating rink - (a novel)

 Abstract: 

With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolano, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, “declared, in all apparent seriousness, that what he would most like to have been was a homicide detective.”
Set in the seaside town of Z, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators, and revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. A ruined mansion, knife-wielding women, political corruption, sex, and jealousy all appear in this atmospheric chronicle of a single summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, businessmen, immigrants, bureaucrats, social workers, and drifters.

Exquisite . . . another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. The Skating Rink manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing. --Wyatt Mason"
There is much intensity at work, although The Skating Rink leavens the melancholy of exile with an interest in the uncanny and a knack for the surrealist image. --Siddhartha Deb ""Books of the Year" ""
This is pure Bolano. "
This is pure Bolano.
This is pure Bolaño.
A highly engaging novel of lyricism, menace and beauty. -- James Yeh
Darkly funny, but also tender and complex in the tenor of classic Bolano novels. -- Savannah ("Savvy") Jones
Lucid fury . . . is a pretty good description of Bolano's aesthetic. He is a novelist of voraciousness without sentiment, hardness to a fever pitch. -- Todd Shy
One of the strangest mysteries...with its dark-summer heat that all but comes off the page. -- Marilis Hornidge
This short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far...Bolano in The Skating Rink manages to honor genre conventions while simultaneously exploding them, creating a work of intense and unrealized longing. -- Wyatt Mason
When I read Bolano, I think: everything is possible again....How he makes one laugh! The laughter of someone who just escaped being buried live, and suddenly remembers how badly she wants to live. -- Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love