Novel: The Skating Rink

Overview

Roberto Bolaño's novel The Skating Rink (1993) is a compact, noir-tinged narrative that mixes obsession, jealousy, and small-town corruption. Set in a seaside town in Spain, the book traces how a beautiful young figure skater becomes the focal point for a tangle of erotic longing and petty power struggles. The story unfolds as a mystery about a crime, but its true interest lies in the ways memory, desire, and reputation warp the lives of those who orbit the rink.

Setting and Structure

The action takes place in a provincial coastal town where tourism, clerical bureaucracy, and fading industry shape everyday life. Bolaño makes the locality feel simultaneously ordinary and claustrophobic, a place where social hierarchies and secret resentments are intensified by the town's isolation and seasonal rhythms. The skating rink itself, an unlikely, almost surreal presence in a sun-drenched seaside place, acts as a symbolic and literal center for the novel's tensions.
The narrative is delivered through multiple first-person voices, each offering a fragmentary, subjective account of events. These overlapping perspectives create a mosaic of partial truths and unreliable memories, so that readers must piece together motives and consequences from contradictory reports. Bolaño uses this polyphony to explore how stories are told, suppressed, and reshaped by those who survive them.

Plot and Conflict

A small cast of characters becomes entangled around the skater and the rink she inhabits. The novel follows the arrival and influence of the skater on the town's male residents: men who respond with admiration, desire, or possessive rage. An improvised ice rink, an extravagant, almost private project, draws attention and envy, and the girl's talent and beauty catalyze rivalries that escalate beyond social sniping.
When a violent crime occurs, its causes and perpetrators are not immediately clear. Bolaño focuses less on procedural detection than on the psychological fallout: how suspicion spreads, how reputations are ruined or defended, and how small acts accumulate into irreversible consequences. The crime functions as both a literal rupture and a revelation of deeper moral decay in the town's relationships.

Characters and Voices

Rather than develop heroic protagonists, Bolaño sketches a constellation of flawed, ordinary figures: local officials, a poet, seasonal workers, and others whose perspectives illuminate the town from different social angles. Each narrator is partial, motivated, and sometimes evasive, so character portraits emerge through gaps and contradictions. The young skater herself remains partly elusive, seen as much through the projections of those around her as by any direct self-revelation.
Bolaño's characters are drawn with a mix of empathy and sardonic distance. Their desires are everyday and pitiable, ambition, sexual longing, envy, yet the cumulative effect of their choices feels profound and ominous. The novel emphasizes how small towns magnify private failings into public tragedies.

Themes and Tone

The Skating Rink examines the corrosive interplay of longing and power, the distortions of memory, and the ethics of storytelling. Bolaño is interested in how art, desire, and petty authority intersect: the rink is both an unlikely aesthetic project and a monument to possessive will. The tone blends noir bleakness with dry humor and melancholic observation, producing a narrative that is bleak without being nihilistic.
There is also an ongoing meditation on the unreliability of accounts and the impossibility of fully knowing another person. By giving voice to multiple narrators, the novel resists a single moral interpretation and instead invites readers to weigh competing versions of the same events.

Style and Significance

Concise and taut, the prose balances understated description with occasional poetic flashes. Bolaño's restraint intensifies the novel's suspense and moral ambiguity. Though shorter than some of his later works, The Skating Rink anticipates recurring concerns, obsession, fragmented narration, and the dark edges of artistic life, that would define much of his subsequent fiction. The result is a compact, haunting book that lingers long after its last page.