Monsieur Pain
by Roberto Bolaño (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)
Occult sciences, César Vallejo, WWII, hopeless love, and a final “Epilogue for Voices”:Monsieur Pain is a hallucinatory masterwork by the great Roberto Bolaño.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
From Booklist
Review
About the Author
Starred Review. Bolaño's brief, wonderfully eccentric novel moves around two themes he developed at length in The Savage Detectives—poets and conspiracies. In 1938 Paris, semirecluse Pierre Pain, the 48-year-old mesmerist narrator, is in love with young widow Marcelle Reynaud, who calls him to request his service in treating a friend's husband. Eager to impress, Pain agrees to treat the man, Oscar Vallejo, a Peruvian poet, who is hiccupping himself to death. Pain's re-entry into normal life soon goes awry: two thuggish Spaniards bribe him to withdraw from the case, Pain experiences auditory hallucinations, Madame Reynaud disappears, and Pain runs into a fellow mesmerist, Plomeur-Boudou, working as a torturer for Franco, who tells Pain an obscure tale about the purported assassination of Pierre Curie. Is all this simply a bizarre swirl of coincidences befalling a lonely and slightly mad bachelor, or are these events links in a chain of murders? One of Bolaño's first novels, this already displays his brilliant, alchemical gift for transmuting the dead-ends of life into sinister mysteries. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Pierre Pain, the protagonist of this late Chilean writer’s most recent novel to be translated into English, is a mesmerist. He lives in Paris, in 1938. His fringe occupation is in keeping with the overall illusory, otherworldly air permeating all of Bolaño’s fiction, certainly in full bloom in this oblique yet—forgive the pun—mesmerizing story of the driving force of guilt. As it turns out, the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies abed in a hospital, and a female friend of Pain, for whom he harbors great desire, asks him to treat Vallejo, who is the husband of a friend of hers. Two dark and sinister fellows pay Pain not to treat Vallejo; taking their bribe money leads to Pain’s spiraling descent. Delightfully noirish (“the night smells of something strange”), this tight narrative might have been written with both Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges whispering in the author’s ear. And Bolaño has done these two masters proud. --Brad Hooper
“Employing a reserved and stately voice reminiscent of pre-Modernist fiction, Pain's tale is itself mesmerizing, debonair and entertaining.” (Cooper Renner - Elimae)
“John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols.” (John M. Richardson - Esquire)
“Delightfully noirish.” (Brad Hooper - Booklist)
“Monsieur Pain, an early novella, beautifully translated by Chris Andrews, joins his other works in all their aching splendour.” (Carolina de Robertis - National Post)
“Bolaño's gleeful but deadpan bouillabaisse of French surrealism, expressionism, and Kafkaesque unease.” (Dan Vitale - Three Percent)
“A very good read and essential for Bolaño completists.” (Craig Morgan Teicher - The Plain Dealer)
“This beautifully translated early novella, set in Paris... joins the late author's other works in all its aching splendor.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“A heightened sense of analogy aligns careless deserters, serious moviegoers and sold-out psychics to a world of labyrinthine visions….” (Roberto Ontiveros - The Dallas Morning News)
“It is more accessible than anything else of his I've read. We're sailing smoothly on Bolaño's flowing prose.” (Trevor Berrett - The Mookse and the Gripes)
“A real discovery and a substantial addition to the growing Bolaño library in English.” (Stephen Henighan - The Quarterly Conversation)
“Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.” (Francisco Goldman - The New York Times Magazine)
“Roberto Bolaño was an examplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results are multi-dimensional.” (Sarah Kerr - The New York Review of Books)
“A surrealist's attic of unlikely juxtapositions…. Unease rules.” (Will Blythe - The New York Times Book Review)
“John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols.” (John M. Richardson - Esquire)
“Delightfully noirish.” (Brad Hooper - Booklist)
“Monsieur Pain, an early novella, beautifully translated by Chris Andrews, joins his other works in all their aching splendour.” (Carolina de Robertis - National Post)
“Bolaño's gleeful but deadpan bouillabaisse of French surrealism, expressionism, and Kafkaesque unease.” (Dan Vitale - Three Percent)
“A very good read and essential for Bolaño completists.” (Craig Morgan Teicher - The Plain Dealer)
“This beautifully translated early novella, set in Paris... joins the late author's other works in all its aching splendor.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“A heightened sense of analogy aligns careless deserters, serious moviegoers and sold-out psychics to a world of labyrinthine visions….” (Roberto Ontiveros - The Dallas Morning News)
“It is more accessible than anything else of his I've read. We're sailing smoothly on Bolaño's flowing prose.” (Trevor Berrett - The Mookse and the Gripes)
“A real discovery and a substantial addition to the growing Bolaño library in English.” (Stephen Henighan - The Quarterly Conversation)
“Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.” (Francisco Goldman - The New York Times Magazine)
“Roberto Bolaño was an examplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results are multi-dimensional.” (Sarah Kerr - The New York Review of Books)
“A surrealist's attic of unlikely juxtapositions…. Unease rules.” (Will Blythe - The New York Times Book Review)
Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans,The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.
The poet Chris Andrews has translated many books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.
The poet Chris Andrews has translated many books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
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