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Roberto Bolaño

Monsieur Pain Hardcover – January 12, 2010

by Roberto Bolaño (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

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Occult sciences, César Vallejo, WWII, hopeless love, and a final “Epilogue for Voices”: Monsieur Pain is a hallucinatory masterwork by the great Roberto Bolano.

Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet César Vallejo is in the hospital, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness, and unable to stop hiccuping. His wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud: the Mesmerist Pierre Pain. Pain, a timid bachelor, is in love with the widow Reynaud, and agrees to help. But two mysterious Spanish men follow Pain and bribe him not to treat Vallejo, and Pain takes the money. Ravaged by guilt and anxiety, however, he does not intend to abandon his new patient, but then Pain’s access to the hospital is barred and Madame Reynaud leaves Paris…. Another practioner of the occult sciences enters the story (working for Franco, using his Mesmeric expertise to interrogate prisoners)―as do Mme. Curie, tarot cards, an assassination, and nightmares. Meanwhile, Monsieur Pain, haunted and guilty, wanders the crepuscular, rainy streets of Paris...

Print length

144 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

January 12, 2010
Dimensions

5.8 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

9780811217149
ISBN-13

978-0811217149
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Booklist

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

Review

"A very good read and essential for Bolano completists."
― Craig Morgan Teicher, The Plain Dealer

"John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols."
― John M. Richardson, Esquire

"Roberto Bolano 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

"Bolano 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

"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

"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

"A real discovery and a substantial addition to the growing Bolano library in English."
― Stephen Henighan, The Quarterly Conversation

About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (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.

Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He also taught at the University of Western Sydney, where he was a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating nine books by Roberto Bolano and ten books (and counting) by César Aira, he also brought the French author Kaouther Adimi’s Our Riches into English for New Directions. Andrews has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. Additionally, he has published the critical studies Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge and Roberto Bolano's Fiction: An Expanding Universe as well as two collections of poems, Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair, for which he won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0811217140
Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; 1st edition (January 12, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780811217149
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811217149
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,350,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #709 in Caribbean & Latin American Literature
- #29,192 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #93,293 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Roberto Bolaño

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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. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolaño translations.

Photo by Farisori (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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2 star		41%
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Colleen

Unimpressed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 23, 2011

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After my AP English teacher told us about how Bolano is a fantastic and highly appraised author, I was excited to read this book. I'm sorry to say i was disappointed. Although the book is filled with some quality descriptions and writing, the plot was hazy and I found i didn't really care about any of the characters. Just not my cup of tea.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 31, 2010

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A small book and worthy of your time. If you have not read Bolano you should. If you have read Bolano you should read Monsieur Pain. It shouldn't be your first Bolano as it is not particularly typical in theme (I suggest '2666') but it shouldn't be missed.

2 people found this helpful

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Stephen Kilborn

not his best

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 5, 2010

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i am a big fan of roberto, have read everything by him. but this one is not that good. i feel i have to read all of his early books just in case.

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Bryan Byrd

Disappointing and Vague, or else Haunting and Evocative

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2010

'Monsieur Pain' is a novel that makes me question why it is exactly that I read novels. Depending on the answer, this particular work is either disappointing and vague, or else haunting and evocative. I suspect that most people who decide to make the plunge into Roberto Bolaño's works, and who start, as I have, with 'Monsieur Pain', will land in the first camp. Try as I might, I simply could not decipher Bolaño's point, and I even read the book again a few days after finishing it the first time, just to be sure I hadn't missed some critical revelation. Bolaño's talent as a writer is never in question, which only adds to my frustration - it feels as though there are great forces skimming just below the conscious level of the text, but which ultimately serve no linear purpose. Instead, it's as if Bolaño wanted to merely suggest these forces, the same way that complex music may suggest an awareness that is inexpressible by other means. As a literary technique, I think this can be significant and revelatory, but with 'Monsieur Pain, I thought it was self-satisfied rather than expansive.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the eponymous character, a doctor specializing in alternative medicines, who is called on to treat the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, during his final days in 1938 Paris. Vallejo, an actual figure from history, was an outspoken anti-fascist, and decidedly on the side of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and the novel appears to conform to the conventions of historical intrigue when two mysterious Spaniards visit Doctor Pain and try to dissuade him from seeing the poet. Pain takes their bribe money, but sees Vallejo anyway, whom he feels as though he has a chance of curing. From this point, the story breaks up into dreamlike sequences where Pain is blocked in all his efforts to pursue either the treatment of Vallejo or the threads of his personal life. The forces aligned against him seem so monolithic and immoveable that I began to suspect that Pain really was dreaming, or that he was under some kind of hypnotic spell, or that he was a madman, and the entire episode was only in his imagination.

There are other themes at work here too - near the end of the book, Pain stumbles onto an old associate, who is now an intelligence officer for Franco's army. Between Vallejo and this man, Pleumeur-Bodou, they seem to represent the two sides of the civil war - one frail, sickly, a poet, and the other a great block of a man, versed in the power of suggestion, confident and powerful. Pain's ineffectual intellectualism in the middle could be Bolaño's indictment of all such uncommitted parties, especially in regards to the upheavals he witnessed in Latin America, of which the Spanish conflict is only a substitute. Or perhaps in my effort to shoehorn this novel into a coherent narrative, I've read too much into it. I don't know, but after going over it twice, this is the closest I've come to discovering a point to the book, though I'll admit it seems like a tenuous interpretation - and even if I did know that this was the author's intention, I'd still question its implications.

Bolaño is also very clever in this short text, which is interesting when I notice it, but which also makes me wonder what I've missed, and contributes to the feeling of frustration. An example - Pain has studied the work of Franz Mesmer, from whom we get the idea of mesmerism. In one of Pain's odd, paranoid excursions into unfamiliar sections of Paris to avoid the Spaniards, he stops in a small cafe and talks to two young men. They are conceptual artists, and show off an example of their work displayed in the cafe. They call it an underwater sculpture, and it is a miniature scene inside a fish tank of a catastrophic train wreck, complete with bodies strewn about. This scene, and the characters of the two young men, seem to exist only in order to communicate that the name of the train is the 'Meersburg Express'. Meersburg is also the town in which Franz Mesmer died. It was pure luck that I discovered this connection, and the few others that I was able to pick up only intensified the feeling that I was missing a great deal more. As I say, clever is fine, I suppose, but it also wears on me after a bit, especially if I think the author is having a laugh at the reader's expense.

Three stars may be harsh for 'Monsieur Pain' - the writing is excellent and I never felt that Bolaño lost control of his narrative. In fact, I think he said exactly what he wanted to say - I just never knew what that was.

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Michael J. Ettner

"The sensation of unreality . . . infiltrating everything"

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2010

The principal audience for this book is readers who have tackled and enjoyed Bolaño's mature novels, most notably "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" -- and who would now like to engage in a bit of literary archeology. If you are such a reader, and want to trace back, to their earliest expression, Bolaño's mature themes, motifs and obsessions, then "Monsieur Pain" will offer you many rewards. Dreams, delirium, labyrinths, assassinations, artists versus fascists, secret histories, alienation, a blurred line between realism and fantasy -- it's all here in a rudimentary state.

But I'm reluctant to recommend this short (134-page) novel to a novice reader. The reason is this: Bolaño's strength is in what one critic called his "summative" powers -- his ability to encompass a mass of subjects, to assemble a formidable mountain of prose that draws you into a relentlessly engrossing world.

There are writers who excel at shorter forms (short stories; sonnets) but who fail at more sustained efforts (novels; epic poems). Bolaño may be an example of the opposite -- an author who is most convincing when creating lengthy works of cumulative power, but who may strike you as meandering, indulgent, and unfulfilling, when he invites you on a shorter excursion. I suspect many new readers will find "Monsieur Pain" to be a fragment-like experience without much pay-off. In short, this is not the best of Bolaño.

That is not to say the book lacks felicities apt to please a new reader. If you are comfortable with unconventional fiction, tolerant of detours and ambiguity, and intrigued by what happens when Poe meets Borges meets Paul Auster meets Thomas Pynchon -- then take the plunge.

Among the pleasures of "Monsieur Pain" is how economically Bolaño sketches scene after scene, managing to disorient the reader while generally maintaining narrative equilibrium. For me, the experience of reading "Monsieur Pain" was akin to watching a film noir, one with an experimental bent. One reviewer likened it to to the style and effect of David Lynch. As for his treatment of details, some scenes reminded me of Hitchcock, especially in the way Bolaño "edits" the sights and sounds of a sequence, and the way he uses physical surroundings to echo psychological space, and vice versa. At the very least you are likely to come away impressed by how skillfully the author (who viewed himself principally as a poet) taps into the strange beauty of the world, and conveys this with a sensitive descriptive power.

Bolaño's wizardry with a pen shines through clearly in Chris Andrews' translation. Pierre Pain, the shy narrator, describes a surprise appearance of his romantic interest, Madame Reynaud, at his garret: "The light delineating her silhouette had the gray intimacy of certain Parisian mornings." Later that day, called to the bedside of a dying poet, he is struck by how "the silence in the room seemed to be full of holes." The patient's face "displayed the strange disconsolate dignity shared by all those who have been confined in a hospital for some time." Later, anger and resentment seize the narrator, which he describes as "gradually hardening me from within like a carcass being stuffed by a taxidermist." Toward the end of the book he enters the rear of a darkened movie theater, his eyes adjusting to this scene:

"An aisle divided the rows of seats, from which the heads of the viewers protruded like nocturnal flowers; they were sparsely scattered, unclassifiable, mostly alone and isolated in their places."

That neatly captures Bolaño's vision of the world.

(Mike Ettner)

31 people found this helpful

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CloselyObservedEnglish

There's a lot to like about this excursion into detective fiction by the man ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 10, 2018

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Some say this is not worth reading if you're just getting into Bolano, but I strongly disagree. There's a lot to like about this excursion into detective fiction by the man who brought us '2666'.

Tanupam Akuli

The novel starts with the promise of suspense, but ...

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on November 18, 2015

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The novel starts with the promise of suspense, but doesn't live up to the questions raised in the beginning. All the questions remain unanswered.

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