Monsieur Pain

“The greatest writer to have appeared in Latin America since the so-called ‘boom’ . . . I’m tempted to call Bolaño the love child of David Lynch and Jorge Luis Borges—he’s that visceral and erudite—but this wouldn’t do justice to his ambition.” —John Powers, NPR’s Fresh Air

In 1938 Paris, Monsieur Pierre Pain, a beleaguered mesmerist and a lonely bachelor, receives a telegram from his friend and unrequited love, Madame Reynaud: an acquaintance of hers lies in a hospital bed beset with a mysterious, and apparently terminal, case of the hiccups. She entreats Pain to use his peculiar skill set to cure him, and buoyed by her confidence, he agrees. But nothing about this case turns out to be ordinary, and soon Pain finds himself entangled in a dark and indecipherable sequence of events that sends him racing through the umbrous streets of Paris, lost and delirious. He attempts to visit the patient—none other than the exiled Peruvian poet César Vallejo—only to be barred from his bedside. He is stalked by a ghostly pair of men who emerge from the shadows to bribe him not to treat the poet. He encounters a former peer, now working across the border in war-torn Spain, whose career has taken a shockingly sinister turn, one which may explain this entire nightmare—or prove just another coincidence. A hypnotic and surreal noir, Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain takes us on a labyrinthine journey through conspiracy, occultism, and the unfathomable evil looming in our midst.