"The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño (Picador) The Chilean’s huge novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 speak for themselves, while his prolific oeuvre, bequeathed by a doomed man in a hurry, will continue to fuel conferences, yet don’t overlook this entertainingly eccentric debut – first published in Spain in 1993 but published in English for the first time this year – which is worthy of the Coen brothers and somehow made plausible by the colourful characterisation." Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times

The three narrators are what make this book interesting. Three narrative perspectives, the interests and worldviews of which Bolaño had to keep track. Thinking of it this way makes me see the book as a small feat.
I will not spoil the ending, but I will say that the revelation of the crime holds a randomness that strikes me as accurate, accurate to a certain kind of violence, as if it had bubbled out of an unrelated desperation, a pervasive, underlying desperation within which violence appears at random.
I got a bit tired of and bothered by the underdeveloped character of Nuria, but what do we see of Bolaño’s female characters—that they are physically “beautiful” and that’s about it. ( )

Another great turn for Bolaño. The three narrators take a few chapters to get the hang of, but once it's moving, it moves very quickly. ( )

3.5 A good, not exceptional, short Bolaño novel. Big ups for being a murder-mystery! Worth it for the signature multi-voiced narrators and emotional range, though not the scope or depth he has shown elsewhere. ( )

Costa Brava noir rife with corruption and a homicidal miasma as refracted through three fragmented POVs which overlap and occlude with a masterful touch. ( )