Monsieur Pain

“Full of moral and political urgency . . . Excellent.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian

In 1938 Paris, Pierre Pain, a lonely bachelor and a beleaguered mesmerist, receives a telegram from his friend Madame Reynaud. An acquaintance of hers lies in a hospital bed beset with a mysterious—and apparently terminal—case of the hiccups, and she entreats Pain to cure him. Quietly in love with Reynaud, and buoyed by her faith in him, he agrees to see the patient, the exiled Peruvian poet César Vallejo. So sets off a nightmarish and labyrinthine chain of events that sees Pain racing, breathless, through the umbrous streets of Paris: He finds himself barred from approaching Vallejo’s bedside. He is trailed by a ghostly pair of Spaniards who emerge from the shadows only to bribe him not to treat the poet. He encounters a former peer, now working across the Spanish border, whose career has taken a shockingly sinister turn. A hypnotic and surreal noir, Roberto Bolaño''s Monsieur Pain takes us on a vertiginous journey through conspiracy, occultism, and the unspeakable evil looming in our midst.