The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano is mysterious, intriguing, and suspenseful despite its easy and quiet pace.  I knew a dead body was coming (because all the different narrators told me so) but I was in no hurry to get to it and neither was Bolano.  The atmosphere had to build first, and the characters had to come to life, bit by bit, rib by rib, idiosyncrasy by idiosyncrasy.  The characters range from slightly off-keel to totally around the bend, with the exception of Lola.  Lola is the harbinger of possibility and the only person offering any semblance of stability — and in the end, she too joins the army of migratory agents, leaving the fictional town on the Costa Brava behind, with its summer tourists, its seasonal workers, and its crumbling palace built by another emigrant, a man who left and returned, wealthy but wacked. Those drawn to the Palace Benvingut (“welcoming” in Catalan) are estranged, displaced, uprooted, or rejected; they seek hope, shelter, refuge — but in the end, the palace only offers death.

The Skating Rink is about escape through movement, the movement of humans from one place to another, from one emotion to another, from one person to another.  While affording refuge in escape, movement also brings despair in loneliness, misunderstanding, and failed expectations.  And yet the characters keep moving, hoping against hope that they will finally find the place they will never have to leave, escape from, forget.

The Skating Rink is a wonderfully subtle noir tale of layered meanings and labyrinthine relationships that in the end reveals itself to be a simple story, harsh and heartbreaking.

The Skating Rink was translated by Chris Anderson.