I rated this book as a 4 but really wanted to give it a 4.5. Compared to Savage Detectives and 2666, it is a smaller story, less complex, but, as usual with Roberto Bolaño's books, written beautifully, better than a 4.

Bolaño writes using multiple first person voices offering different perspectives. The personalities of the characters, their way of speaking is distinctive. In Savage Detectives and 2666, he wrote from multiple perspectives but also setting the scenes in diverse geographical locations over a length of time. The realization I had while reading this book, something I knew but hadn't really hit me, is that each character's observations are as if they are unedited, they describe scenes in detail and in a 'natural' voice, the way that a person's mind might see the scene, quickly scanning the details, thoughts that we might have but edited out when speaking.

The story is told in the three voices of the main male characters, Remo Moran, a successful businessman and writer, Enric Rosquelles, a midlevel bureaucrat for the city of "Z". Both of these characters are in love with Nuria Marti, an ice skater who wants to skate professionally. The third voice, Gaspar Heredia is a Mexican poet who works at the local campground (does this sound familiar?) and who lacks the proper papers to be in the country. He is in love with Caridad, a homeless and unstable woman who lives at the campground. Right from the beginning, you find out that there has been a murder but the identity of the murdered woman is not revealed until near the end of the book.

Unlike the two big books, this story takes place during a single summer at the Spanish seaside town of "Z", and, although the characters wander off to Barcelona, the actual story takes place in one place. Because of this focussed setting, I think it's probably more accessible, easier to read, maybe an introduction to the type of work that the author creates. It can be read quickly, or, in order to relish the language, savored over time. ( )

An interesting novel. Set in the seaside town of Z in Spain, the novel spins around three narrators variously linked to each other and to a beautiful figure skating champion who is devastated when she is dropped from the national team. A besotted municipal official (chief advisor to the mayor) secretly builds her a skating rink, with public funds, in an abandoned castle on the outskirts of town so that she can train to try to regain her position on the team. One of the other narrators is a small-time businessman living in Z, but not from there and he gives a job as a night watchman at a campsite to the other narrator who is a failed writer/poet. The lives of these four people, plus two female vagrants who seem to survive more by their wits than anything else, intertwine and when a murder occurs, the municipal official is wrongly accused in addition to his disgrace for the misuse of public funds. The novel moves slowly and its interest is in the interplay of the characters, each providing a different perspective on the other and certainly different from their self-images.