Diary of a Madman and Other Stories: Day 1

In his introduction to Diary of a Madman and Other Stories translator Ronald Wilks states that Gogol wrote

as by using apparently irrelevant, trivial details to astonishing effect.  Invariably these details are physical, but not at all in the sense in which Tolstoy uses them to develop his characters.  Gogol’s characters do not have psychological depth and are developed in the main purely by external physical descriptions.  Rightly they have been called waxlike figures, mere puppets.

I disagree slightly with his claim.  Yes, Gogol uses details that seem irrelevant and trivial to astonishing effect but I think these trivial details are what give his characters psychological depth.  Towards the end of the “The Nose” the doctor (who is an incredibly minor character) is described as such:

Every morning he used to eat apples and was terribly meticulous about keeping his mouth clean, spending at least three quarters of an hour rinsing it out every day and using five different varieties of toothbrush.

Again, that is an irrelevant, trivial detail but Gogol put it there for a reason.  Perhaps that reason is only to make his reader laugh, or to further illustrate the world he is creating (after all, the story is about a man who’s nose takes flight one night, ends up inside of a piece of bread, becomes a civil servant and decides to reattach itself some time later) but it also gives us a perfect idea of what kind of man the doctor is.  Meticulous.  Clean.  Afraid of germs.  Afraid of his breath smelling.  Afraid as coming across as uncouth.  Afraid of his teeth falling out.  Afraid of looking like some dimwit with no teeth.  In that one sentence description, we get to know a lot about this one minor character.  There is psychological depth there.  It is not spelled out nor is much time taken with it, but it is there.

That being said, the world Gogol has created to set his stories in is quirky.  ”Diary of a Madman” is exactly that, diary entries from a man who quickly degenerates from slightly off to completely nuts.  It is quaint.  Gogol does a fantastic job of creating Poprishchin, a lunatic who is completely unaware of his insanity and is completely sincere right until the very end, when he cannot figure out why the soldiers of Spain (asylum workers) keep beating the him, the King of Spain (in his madness he realizes that he is the heir to the Spanish throne).  And it works.  For the most part.  As Poprishchin worsens his delusions grow larger and larger and the dates of his entries become stranger and more impossible:

April 43rd, 2000

86th Martober, between day and night

The first

January in the same year falling after February

What bothers me here is that the dates keep getting stranger and more confused until they no longer make any sense but Poprishchin’s writing stays (fairly) lucid (for a madman).  His sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary do not degrade or become confused.  The dates are funny but it doesn’t really work as a device when only one part of the house starts falling apart but the rest remain intact.

So far “Diary” is the weaker of the two stories I have read.  ”The Nose” is much richer, more compelling and deals with more themes: social status, physical appearance in society, sexual confidence, medicine.  I am starting to wonder why the collection is called Diary of a Madman and Other Stories and not The Nose and Other Stories or The Overcoat and Other Stories.  I guess “Diary of a Madman” just sounds a lot cooler and will probably draw more readers than a story called “The Overcoat.”

Short Cuts: Day 3

The warmest story in Short Cuts, the story dealing with the more loving, caring side of life is “A Small, Good Thing.”  It shares similar themes with the other stories: loss, grief, death; but it deals with them in very different ways.  Ann and Howard’s son, Scotty is put into a coma by a hit-and-run.  Like Carver’s other characters, Ann and Howard are not in control of their situation and things happen do them as if they were merely dead bodies caught in the current of the Naches.  They watch over Scotty in the hospital, reassured by doctors that he will be just fine.  He is almost over the hill.  But he is not.  When Scotty dies they find respite in the kitchen of a bakery where an embittered and socially awkward baker nourishes them with rolls and conversation.  He tells them “You have to eat and keep going.  Eating is a small, good thing at a time like this.”  And so is this story.  In the midst of all the chaos Carver has created he gives us this one small, good thing to bring us back to life.  Even in Carver’s dirty reality there is comfort.

Tess Gallagher or Robert Altman (or whoever organized this selection of stories) deserves credit for putting “Jerry and Molly and Sam” and “Collectors” as buffers between “A Small, Good Thing” and “Tell the Women We’re Going.”  The middle stories help to bring us back into the darker side of Carver’s world before “Tell the Women We’re Going” rips it all to shreds.  What starts off as very ordinary, mundane story about two best friends and their lazy existence (high school, odd jobs, cars, women, kids, houses) quickly spirals into a nightmare, interestingly, once alcohol is introduced.  Again, we have Carver using alcohol as a catalyst for the most terrible things people do.  You get drunk, your life falls apart.  Simple.  The characters in this story (as well as most of the others) spend so much time self-medicating with a bottle of whiskey or a can of beer they hardly realize their lives getting darker and slipping further out of their control.

The final piece in the collection, “Lemonade,” is a poem.  Truthfully I didn’t know what to expect from a Raymond Carver poem.  It ended up being much like reading a Richard Brautigan poem, not that Carver and Brautigan are similar in any way.  What I mean is, reading a Carver poem is incredibly similar to reading a Carver story.  Identical even.  Here Carver brings up the notion of Sweetness.  While reflecting on the death of his grandson a character reflects “God always takes the sweetest ones, doesn’t He?”  In the end of the poem Sweetness is brought up again, this time in regards to the deceased’s father:

But dying is for the sweetest ones.  And he remembers

sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly

he was given that other lifetime.

Sweetness is innocence.  The side of life Carver rarely finds time to write about but acknowledges all the same.  In these stories dying is certainly for the sweetest ones.  Scotty in “A Small, Good Thing.”  The girls in “Tell the Women We’re Going.”  Only the innocent die.  Only the innocent are allowed out of the trap of life, the curse of living.

Short Cuts: Day 2

In the story “So Much Water So Close to Home” our narrator, Claire (our first female narrator in the book), details the nuances of her life, specifically dealing with life after her husband finds a dead body while on a fishing trip.  About halfway through the story, right before she recounts her life leading up to this point, she states:

Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer.

And there you have not only Carver’s main concern in this particular story but all of Short Cuts (up to this point, at least).  Carver’s characters live in an alcohol-soaked world of neo-ego-nihilism.  Wives ands Husbands are not upfront with their thoughts and emotions.  They take what they want from each other without sharing themselves fully.  They sip whiskey and drink beer, self medicating the disease of living.

In “Vitamins” all of the characters live in a world of booze.  Actions are taken only when characters have been drinking (and characters make fairly poor choices throughout) and the whole story has a sort of sickly, something-is-not-right-here feel to it.  It is not glamourous.  It is not desirable.  It is very real.  And dirty.  In addition to alcohol we have vitamins.  The narrator’s wife, Patti, sells vitamins.  Patti and her associates talk only of vitamins.  Patti dreams of vitamins.  These things that are supposed to help us, keep us strong and healthy, are just as big of an obsession as alcohol.  These obsessions make things fall apart.

Short Cuts: Day 1

At times Raymond Carver’s Short Cuts is more David Lynch than Robert Altman (co-writer and director of the film, Short Cuts).  Short Cuts shares the same setting (the Pacific Northwest) and many of the same images of Lynch’s films (a cross-dressing man, a severed ear) and even explores the bizarre side of a seemingly normal suburban life.  A bar scene in the piece “Vitamins” is eerily similar to the lurking horror in the background of Blue Velvet.  But the similarities don’t go much further.  Unlike Lynch, Carver writes about the mundane, the ordinary.  Occasionally out-of-the-ordinary things occur to these ordinary people but they are not fantastic or magical occurrences; they are coincidence.  The tragedy of luck.  The reality of living.

Carver sets his words down like a contemporary Hemingway; terse sentences, language that is not overly ornate or unbelievable.  Carver’s characters speak conversationally, as you would want them to.  The main characters stoically let their lives take form around them, often unable or unwilling to change the events that shape their lives.  In the early story “Will You Please be Quiet, Please?” Ralph, unable to cope with his wife’s infidelity, gets drunk, loses money and gets beaten up.  These things happen to him, he does not seem like an active participant in his fate.

I heard a piece on the radio the other day about posthumous publication of unfinished works.  Apparently, Carver’s widow, Tess, is trying to publish some of his unfinished works.  Apparently, it has come to light that Carver was much wordier that we would assume from reading his stories.  The austere, minimalist Carver may have been created in part by Carver’s editor, which is a fascinating concept.  It makes me wonder what kind of relationship Carver had with his editor… did he have one main editor?  Did it take these two people to create great, singular works?

Blindness: A Reflection

I read Blindness by Jose Saramago two years ago this fall… and winter.  Like many books, it came recommended by a friend and somehow Blindness (which was written in 1995, translated in 1997) and Jose Saramago, for that matter, never came across my literary radar before.  Saramago’s vivid descriptions, raw style, and disturbing content stayed with me when I wasn’t reading the book and lingered in my brain after completing it.  I was unable to read Blindness straight through for these reasons. Yes, I was gripped, I was deep within the world Saramago had created but about 200 pages into the thing I couldn’t go on.  I was too disturbed so I put the book down, read something else and came back to it a bit later.  Glad I did.

Saramago writes like he is telling you a story aloud.  There is a clear narrator here and the narrator isn’t just relaying a story to you, he is engaging you, asking you to think, gaining your trust.  He weaves asides and tangents into the narrative without ever seeming like he is getting off course with the story.  His tangents aren’t detours, they are essential bits of information, musings, idioms… captured perfectly in written word.  Instead of stepping away from the action to flesh out the world of the novel (like Hugo does in Les Miserables, halting the momentum of the story to give us entire chapters [which read like history lessons] on things like religious orders and argot), all the information is right there, in between the conversations and actions of our nameless characters.

The longest and most harrowing portion of the novel is set in a mental hospital where the City sends all of the victims of the Blindness.  This is where Saramago really gets to lay out and explore his themes.  Essentially cut off from the rest of the world, the inmates begin to loose their ties with civilization.  They steal rations.  Rape.  Murder.  It all builds until the hospital becomes a lawless nation, the darkest vision of what humanity becomes when we let go of pretenses, embrace our basest desires.  When we have no compassion or regard for those who make up the world around us, what do we become?  Even the Doctor’s Wife, the only seeing character in novel, who shows exemplary amounts of kindness and compassion has her weaker moments, her boiling point.  But she is not blind.  She still has to see what others cannot, has to guide those who cannot make their way through this world alone.  At times she wishes she was blind, no longer a savior, a hero, the one whom other people must rely on but she must be that stronger person.  She must be Piggy’s specks.

The book progresses well and does not get bogged down in a repetitive cycle many “survival” books (The Road) tend to get caught up in:

DANGER!

safety

DANGER!

safety…

This is not to say that Blindness is a strictly a survival story.  It is about the miracle of living, the fragility of life, what we as humans must do when we are given tools to help each other.  Incidentally, we are all born with these tools but do not know exactly how to use them at times.  Surprisingly, Blindness does not leave you destitute at the end.  There is hope.  There is respite.  There are themes of spiritualism but it must be noted that being religious and being spiritual are not synonymous here.  We can be blind to religion but if we are spiritually blind, we are useless.

I.: Post-Mortem

Upon reaching the end of I. (and by that I mean the end of the novel I. not the novel titled End of I.) I find myself wondering why I should read End of I.?  After reading the nineteen chapters/stories that make up I. I feel like I have  a very good grasp on who I. is, his world, his life.  And I’m not certain I want or need to know any more.  It was a good read once I got caught up in it’s currents but by the time the latter chapters “The Error” “Candle” and especially “The Pickle” show up, it all seems a bit redundant and at times, boring.  I see the talent and craft it takes to write a chapter like “The Pickle,” a rumination on writing, walking and thinking that comes off as completely stream-of-conciseness but has to be meticulously written and re-written and proofed.  But even with craft and talent it doesn’t mean the end product is always successful.  ’The Pickle” seems to drag slowly across fifteen or so pages running itself in circles, not achieving much other than getting deeper into the mind and writing process of I. but the problem is, we’ve seen it before.  All the little elements of this chapter have been touched upon already and “The Pickle” adds to it without exactly expanding upon it.

“The Error,” while a bit meandering, works a lot better.  We get the same ruminations and self-flagellation from earlier chapters like “Speed Bump” and “The Apology” but this time the social faux-pas, the Error, that I. beats himself up over is so miniscule and harmless it is hilarious.  Over-booked and stressed out, I. misses a dinner party and instead takes his ailing wife out for dinner for her birthday.  We see one the best sides of I. we have seen so far at this dinner, which opens the story.  When he returns home to find out he blew off a prior engagement (which he even wrote down correctly in his datebook) he begins to worry and apologize and, even though he knows it is his fault, places the blame on the hosts of the party and alters his datebook to show his innocence.

The final and longest chapter “Again” meanders.  No. It takes one step forward and two steps back.  Over and over… and over again.  Once we get into the content of the chapter and past the meta-stuff it really is a touching ending to the book.  We finally get to see a glimpse of I. and his wife in the beginning of their relationship and since we know where their lives are headed in the next twenty years or so, it comes off as compelling stuff.  When we finally get to it.  I am convinced I will pick up End of I. one of these days (I have to.  I own it.) but I won’t be reading it next as I had originally planned.

I.: Day 3

I. reads like a Joe Frank radio drama read by Garrison Keillor: Stripped down language, a sense of urgency often times mixed with too much description and humor in the darkness.  I. is not at all what I expected it to be.  I wasn’t expecting a straightforward novel but I wasn’t expecting the first-second-third-person-meta-jumble I was blindsided by.

The novel sticks to a third-person perspective for  quite a while.  It isn’t until the chapter titled “Detours” that our main character (decidedly named “I.” by this point) takes an active role in the story-telling.  Instead of the third-person partial-omniscient narrator Dixon has used before, we get a first-person narrative from I. who is typing what he is thinking.  We are reading his raw thoughts. Then he switches to third person, claiming to be more comfortable with it and by the end, the story is being told in that difficult-to-pull-off second person.  This is the first time in the novel that we get a sense that I. is in fact the narrator and has been all along.

In the “Author” chapter, Dixon takes the style he’s been developing slowly over the course of the novel and uses it to it’s full potential.  We have placeholder names, not-really-changing-but-kind-of-changing narration (the narrator refers to himself as “He” and sometimes “I.” but the latter is not used a pronoun but rather an initial, even though the narrator admits  his name does not begin with the letter “I”.) and a very open self-awareness that this is a story being written by a writer at a typewriter.  Dixon comes out swinging in this chapter.  He carefully (under the guise of I.) lays out what he likes in fiction, what he likes to read, what he likes to write and who he thinks are the greatest writers of all time.  The chapter centers around a series of encounters with Joshua Fels, an author hailed as the greatest of his generation or perhaps since Faulkner.  Or Melville.  Fels comes off as a pompous ass and symbolizes the things I. finds wrong with literature.  Big words.  Confusing parentheticals inside parentheticals.  Unnatural and flowery dialogue between several characters where none of the speakers are identified as they speak.  As Fels is lauded within the story, I.’s career struggles to take off and by the end of the story I. is writing in some sort of confused pseudo-intellectual Felsesque style.  And it’s funny to boot.  Laugh-out-loud funny.

The following chapter, “The Saddest Story” is very similar to Dave Eggers’ short story “Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone.”  It is a sketch of the saddest story I. can think of but will never write.  Keeping in mind this book was published in 2002, it would have been a very inventive chapter at the time.  Since then we have had a meta-glut in literature and the story doesn’t pop as well as it would had I picked up the novel seven years ago.  I regret that.  In no way is I. a museum piece seven years after it’s publication, in fact Dixon does the meta-thing far better than many writers could ever hope to, but meta-literature just isn’t what I’m into right now.  No big deal.

Dave Eggers: 2000-2009

Around the year 2001 I was pretty big on the prefixes “post” and “meta.”  I loved describing things as postmodern or post-hardcore and I couldn’t get enough self-referential/deprecating literature, film and music.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was probably the first “postmodern” book I ever read… or at least it was the first “postmodern” piece of  ”meta-writing” I read after I learned what “postmodern” and “meta” meant.  While it was not the first self-aware piece of literature I had read, it was the most thorough example I had come across.  I was young, a self-proclaimed scholar and Heartbreaking was just what I needed.  Eggers became my Capote.  My Hunter S. Thompson.  He single-handedly reinvented non-fiction (maybe even fiction?).  Books would never be the same!  He was not a writer from a generation or two before mine, he was my voice, my champion!  I went a little overboard in my hero-worship of Dave Eggers at the time.

Heartbreaking is a fine book.  A deeply personal story, it is inventive, well-written and maintained a spot as my “favorite book” for years after my first reading.  Between 2001 and 2004 there probably wasn’t a book I recommended more.  But it is selfish.  It is one of the most self-indulgent pieces of prose I have ever read.  This is not a complaint.  Just a fact.  While Dave Eggers the character is selfless at times in the book (he sacrifices part of his youth to help raise his younger brother, Toph) the novel memoir drips with a tongue-in-cheek self-importance.  The title itself is an ironic stroke of self-promotion which, perhaps, isn’t all irony… after all, Heartbreaking is an (often fictionalized) memoir published when the author was only thirty years old (and only dealing with roughly 8 years of Eggers’ life).  Heartbreaking is also a little gimmicky.  Relying on an overly long, sometimes pointless introduction and a whimsical edition notice instead of getting to the meat and potatoes of the story, Eggers puts off the inevitable.

Note: I have not seen Away We Go or Where the Wild Things Are.  I will also not be taking into account the comedy books Eggers has written with his brother under the pen names Dr. and Mrs. Haggis-On-Whey.  What interests me the most about Dave Eggers is the way his career and writing style have progressed from 2000 until now, how he has gone from selfish to completely selfless.

Once could argue that Eggers’ writing has always included strong themes of selflessness.  As mentioned above, Heartbreaking deals with one man sacrificing a lot to raise his brother.  Also his follow-up novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (or Sacrament or You Shall Know Our Velocity!), is the story of Will and Hand, two friends on a world-wide trip determined to give away wads of cash.  Well, that’s not a selfish act at all, is it?  It can be argued that Will and Hand’s selfless actions are selfishly motivated.  They set out on their journey because they are feeling immense guilt over the death of their friend Jack and their inability to use the money to save his life.  Selfish motivation and a writer still struggling to find his voice in the world of fiction.  Velocity is a mediocre read.  It doesn’t really show Eggers’ real literary chops and to be honest, I thought it was a bummer.  It is also worth mentioning that with Velocity (the first hardback edition at least) Eggers starts the story on the front cover and it continues right through to the end of the book.  Another gimmicky move.  Perhaps Eggers is commenting on the bloated introduction in his previous book and is trying to show the reader that he is chomping at the bit to get to the story at hand.  If so, this is a sign of maturation, of progression of style.  Eggers no longer relies on the crutches of Heartbreaking to carry him through this novel, yet he has traded the crutches for a cane.

We are now at the year 2002, the year in which Eggers created 826 Valencia.

826 Valencia is a non-profit tutoring center and writing lab for students.  It (along with the other chapters of 826 National: 826NYC, 826LA, 826CHI, 826 Boston, 826 Seattle and 826 Michigan) offers drop-in after school tutoring as well as school visits and in-house field trips where students can make books, write stories or simply get help with homework.  For free.  This is where I see Eggers turning his focus away from himself and towards the world as a whole.

His next book was the 2004 short story collection How We Are Hungry which contains a whole mess of previously published stories and a few new ones.  Not a bad read, kind of a mish-mash of Eggers here.  Again, some gimmicky writing, specifically in the stories “Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone” and “There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself.”  The first story mentioned is exactly what it sounds like.  It is not a full and fleshed out story, rather a series of notes about a story.  Of a man.  Who refuses to die alone.  Because of the structure it does not work well on an emotional level (much like Stephen Dixon’s “Saddest Story” chapter from I.) but it get information across.  ”There are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself” was one of the titles that stuck out to me from the table of contents.  I remember clearly sitting in a Chinese restaurant, flipping to the story in question only to find several blank pages.  Touche, Eggers.  You got me.  I get it

In 2006 we see the book that changes everything: What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng.  Is this a novel?  Is it a dictated autobiography?  Is it bullshit?  What is the What is a slightly fictionalized (auto)biography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese Lost Boy.  So now, six years after Heartbreaking, we have Eggers returning to the format and genre he started with but telling someone else’s story.  And really, not just one person’s story or all of the Lost Boy’s stories but he is giving a voice to a People who need it.  Certainly Valentino’s story isn’t representative of all of Sudan but not everyone in Sudan will have the chance to meet a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and dictate his story to them.  What is the What really threw me for a loop.  I found no pretension in its pages.  No “postmodernism” as far as I could tell.  No gimmicks… just a fantastic story that is very well-written.   On top of this, all proceeds go to Valentino Achak Deng’s Sudanese foundation as well as his college education.  Eggers saw no profit on this one.  Or his next novel!

I must admit I have prematurely written this article.  I have Zeitoun, Eggers’ latest effort, in my possession but have yet to read it. However, much like What is the What it is someone else’s story and the proceeds are going to several charities listed within to book.  Now Eggers isn’t just a voice of my generation but TED prize winner and, according to the Utne Reader a visionary who is helping to change the world.  Nine years ago I admired the guy as a writer but today, Dave Eggers is a bona fide Hero.

I.: Day 1

The last time I finished a Bolano I didn’t read anything for at least a week and when I finally did it was All Things Must Fight To Live by Bryan Mealer.  It was educational, engaging and well-written, it just wasn’t Bolano.  When my mind should have been focused on the text in front of me, my mind wandered away to Spain or Mexico City, reminiscing on poetry and murders. I am sorry that Mr. Mealer did not receive my full attention and to make up for it I plan on buying a copy of his latest book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind… just as soon as I finish the twenty or so books I have purchased over the years and not read.

So I. by Stephen Dixon is in a really bad position already, at no fault of the Author.

I. (pronounced “eye” or “one” ?) is a series of non-chronological vignettes from the life of a man named I, I presume.  I is a latter-day Walter Mitty, suffering from time-consuming ruminations rather than time-wasting flights of fancy.  He does not imagine himself to be a pilot or a surgeon but rather plays out the events of his life over and over in his head, imagining the consequences if this had happened instead of that.  It makes for a fairly realistic look into someone’s mind… one small event snowballing into something else that escalates into a catastrophe.  So far the only challenging part of the text is the stilted dialogue of the conversations I imagines, which can be a little too neat and ideal and therefore difficult to get behind.

But I have barely scratched the surface here.  I still don’t have a good handle on who I is… his entire situation, his personality.  I look forward to diving deeper into this one, although I still have dreams of Bolano.

The Skating Rink: Day 3

Due to an unforeseen stranding on the side of a highway across the street from a Medieval Times, my pursuit of The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano was set back roughly 24 hours.  Last night, with my affairs properly in order, I, equipped only with a pot of coffee, sat down with The Skating Rink for one final go-round.

Bolano has shown that he can succeed with both long and short-form novels.  He discovered early on how to make a tight, concise yet wholly enveloping novel and was later able to expand that format into the sprawling, 912 page 2666 (1266 pages in the Spanish edition!) and The Savage Detectives (672 pages in the English).  Even within Bolano’s use of excess (one needs only to look at Part Four of 2666, The Part About the Crimes, to get a sense of Bolano’s excessive redundancy) he finds balance.  Plot threads are always carefully constructed and followed and the prose never gets overly sentimental or purple.  It seems that the only short-comings of Bolano’s shorter works is… that they’re short.  And this is a purely selfish claim.  I just want more Bolano.  The Skating Rink (or By Night in Chile or Distant Star for that matter) don’t need to be longer.  Bolano is able to hammer out exactly what he needs to say in under 200 pages while at the same time creating entire worlds, social structures and meaningful relationships.

The Skating Rink deals with the same themes Bolano is most familiar with: Inevitable violence, poetry and the poet (art as a business, a way of life, a way of understanding, of hiding, ignoring), sex, immigration and love.  It could easily be said that the whole story revolves around murder but it is just as easy to claim that Love sits at the center of The Skating Rink.  The three narrators (and therefore the story) are set into motion by Love.  Obsessive romantic love.  We have our love triangle between Remo, Enric and Nuria and our parallel romantic pursuit of Caridad by Gasparin.  The lives of these five characters (and about a half-dozen more) are irreversibly intertwined and all heading down the same road in different directions.

Bolano keeps us in the dark for a very long time as to who was murdered, how and why, maintaining a high level of tension from cover to cover.  It would be too cheap and easy to write The Skating Rink off as a murder mystery or detective story (two genres which Bolano happily embraces within many of his novels) but the influence is clear.  In his last decade of life Bolano was able to create a voice and style all his own, taking bits and pieces from the Latin American greats as well as his own genius.  Even though The Skating Rink is an earlier novel and in the final group of novels translated to English, it is just as strong as Bolano’s other lurking nightmares.