Monsieur Pain

By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator

Narrated by: Walter Krochmal

“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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Critic reviews

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

“The beauty of [this] slender mystery novel . . . is that it doesn’t behave much like a mystery novel . . . This is the novel as Max Ernst or de Chirico might have written it . . . It is Bolaño’s great gift to make us feel the dimensions of [a] darkness even when we cannot see exactly what it hides.”
—Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review

“[Monsieur Pain] offers considerable pleasures . . . It plays with genre the way a cat plays with a mouse . . . [It] opens onto a nocturnal world of intrigue.”
—Adam Mansbach, Los Angeles Times

“[A] brilliant, noir-steeped fictional world . . . It remains our great task—and our great thrill and joy—to continue the hunt, through the glorious mazes Bolaño crafted for us.”
—Carolina de Robertis, San Francisco Chronicle