A murder mystery that unfolds over a single summer on the Costa Brava, Roberto Bolaño's first novel alternates testimonies from three men: a Chilean writer who was once jailed by Pinochet and now runs a jewellery chain; an illegal immigrant from Mexico employed as a night watchman on a campsite; and a fat Catalan bureaucrat trousering state pesetas to fund an ice rink he hopes will help a figure skater regain her place in the Olympic team. A knife-wielding vagrant with a chronic nosebleed and an opera singer fallen on hard times are also prominent in a narrative that turns the standard police procedural inside out: mostly we're wondering not who the killer is, but who the victim will be.

Preoccupations familiar to anyone who's read Bolaño before  bad dreams, hiccups, foot-long penises and Borgesian summaries of unwritten novels  appear along with his trademark style: we get the frank-yet-oblique register (common phrases are "to be honest" and "I don't know"), the aphorisms ("drinking in a seaside town with tourists isn't really drinking. It only gives you a headache") and the toying with time, whereby an instant unspools for pages and years shrink into a line or two. And we get the similes: a sky is like "a lung in a tub of blue paint"; the act of raising one's arms on a muggy night feels like "anally and vaginally penetrating some atmospheric hallucination or extraterrestrial creature".

This all-out prose can make Bolaño a lot of fun (or, alternatively, ludicrous). One character's remark that his ex-wife loved doing "oddball things"  "talking as if she had Down syndrome, or like the evil child in a movie, pretending her feet are frogs"  balloons into the claim that most women he's known could turn their body parts "into frogs, or elephants, or chickens that went cluck cluck and then pecked, know-it-all snakes, white crows, spiders, wayward kangaroos, when they weren't transforming their whole selves into lionesses, vampires, dolphins, eagles, mummies or hunchbacks of Notre Dame".

As tends to be the case with Bolaño's shorter work, The Skating Rink is less about the destination than the ride  but, like much of what he wrote, it leaves many new novels looking pretty bland. It was published in Spanish nearly 20 years ago.