A chilling noir thriller, Bolano’s earliest

"From the Calle Bucareli, in Mexico City, to murder, you must be thinking…But it's not like that at all, which is why I'm telling you this story…" These are the closing lines of the first lengthy paragraph of "The Skating Rink," Roberto Bolano's most recent translation by Chris Andrews released Aug. 28.

"The Skating Rink" is the only Bolano translation that will appear on American shelves this year. Since his death in 2003 eight of his novels have been published including the renowned "The Savage Detectives" (2007) and arguably his greatest work "2666" (2008), which the latter is rumored to contain a sixth and unpublished part.

"The Skating Rink" was Bolano's first novel to find its way to the printing presses (originally published in Spanish in 2003).

The novel is tight, formulated and is far from the layered madness of his later works.

The book is told from the vantage point of three men living and working in the touristy coastal town of Z. "The Skating Rink" is part confessional, part monologue and very rhythmic in that uniquely Bolanian way, intrinsically poetic and calculated.

First, there is the Mexican Remo Moran, a successful businessman and poet turned novelist. Second, is also a Mexican, Gaspar Heredia, a wanderer and drifter who was also a poet who reconnects with his old friend Moran in Z. Moran employs Gaspar as a late night security guard at his campground. Third, there is the overweight Catalonian Enric Rosquelles who is a social worker and aspiring politician in the town of Z.

The three men piece a puzzle together with vignettes of their version of the story, each sharp piece rapidly creating a whole. All of this is adhered by the same murder in an abandoned palace, containing a secret skating rink up the coast from Z in Y.

The layering of "The Skating Rink" is fairly uncomplicated due to Bolano's metronome like prose.

It is a detective story, a whodunit, complete with a red herring and a manipulative dame. Reading the novel, even with Bolano's sometimes distant description it is easily envisioned in black and white, a noir thriller. At times an orchestral score was expected to kick up in the background, but the crashing waves of the sea filled the void of the orchestra's chairs.

Elements such as the sea, unattainable love, loneliness and the positivity of loss, acceptance and then moving forward pervade this older work. Bolano, even in his budding stages as a novelist was toying with these elements that came to dominate the monolithic and intricate web that became "2666."

What is so unique about Bolano, and his novel's, is his illusory effects. He allows the reader to empathize with his characters as if they were the center of the story while really the intrinsic characters are larger than just three men a woman and a murderer.

Bolano, through his storytelling, is able to breathe life into inanimate objects as he does in "The Skating Rink." The cold and illicit rink is a character and the sprawling palace it is tucked away in is very much an integral character in the drama that eventually unfolds.

The reader begs to know just as much about the nooks and crannies of this mysteriously abandoned coastal palace as the narrators and the idiosyncrasies that make them tick.

"The Skating Rink" is pulp fiction, but with a deeply visceral and human element exposed in the briefest of encounters, essentially the novel never begins or ends.

It is just a glimpse, a vignette of vignettes.