Monsieur Pain

by Roberto Bolaño Narrated by Mario Velásquez

Overview

Monsieur Pain fue publicada por primera vez en 1984 bajo el título La senda de los elefantes gracias a la obtención del Premio Félix Urabayen.

En la primavera de 1938, Monsieur Pierre Pain, acupuntor y seguidor convencido de las teorías mesméricas, recibe el cometido de tratar e intentar curar el hipo de un sudamericano abandonado a su poca suerte y escasos medios en un hospital de París.

Lo que a priori parecía un extraño caso de fiebre alta e hipo persistente, no obstante, se presenta ante sus ojos como un entramado de proporciones inimaginables y abre la puerta a preguntas cuyas respuestas Pain tendrá que desvelar. ¿Qué identidad se oculta tras el rostro pobre y agonizante? ¿Quién, quiénes o qué podrían desear su muerte? ¿Y qué provecho sacarían de ella?

Enfrentado a una red compleja y oscura, el mesmerista habrá de lidiar con sus pasiones más íntimas y el implacable fantasma de la soledad, con el ínfimo atisbo que a la humanidad le resta de dignidad y con la tristeza que, ola tras ola, trago tras trago, todo lo anega.

La crítica ha dicho...
«De Roberto Bolaño me gusta todo, sus grandes, inmensas novelas, pero también los relatos cortos.»
Pedro Almodóvar

Editorial Reviews

Will Blythe

The prevailing architecture of Monsieur Pain is the labyrinth—the hospital, city streets, a nightclub connected to a warehouse all imprison the protagonist in mazes through which he frantically rushes, only to end up face to face with no monster greater than himself…the evil in Monsieur Pain feels ominously real, despite the fact that Bolano hardly enunciates its presence. The novel melds existential anxiety to political terror in a measure peculiar to Bolano—imagine the protagonist of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" if he were being interrogated by the secret police on suspicion of having hidden subversives behind his wall. Readers know, as the characters of Monsieur Pain do not, that Paris in 1938 is a city of sleepwalkers, that a darkness soon comes its way. It is Bolano's great gift to make us feel the dimensions of this darkness even when we cannot see exactly what it hides.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Library Journal

In a rainy Paris in April 1938, the famous Peruvian poet César Vallejo, penniless and expatriate, lies dying of unknown causes in a second-rate clinic. Grasping at straws, Mrs. Vallejo and her friend Madame Reynaud consult a mesmerist named Pierre Pain. Pain is pursued by two Spaniards, who want to pay him to stop seeing Vallejo. However, about halfway through, Bolaño seems to lose direction, avoiding the near suspense he has created and instead floundering in a discussion of mesmerism and an extended scene in the cinema where patrons' conversations become intertwined with movie dialog. The love affair between Pain and Madame Reynaud is never fully developed, and Pain's not very convincing dabbling into the occult bogs down the story. The work is salvaged somewhat by faint touches of humor, e.g., the pun on the titular character's surname, which means bread in French, and the full name's reference to Peter Pan. VERDICT Owing primarily to the publication of the critically acclaimed The Savage Detectives and 2666, Bolaño is undergoing a posthumous revival, as more of his manuscripts are being discovered, published, and translated. For that reason alone, libraries will need to acquire Monsieur Pain, but it's not up to the standard of Bolaño's other works.—Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

The Los Angeles Times

"Monsieur Pain plays with genre the way a cat plays with a mouse."

The New York Times Book Review - Will Blythe

"A surrealistic attic of unlikely juxtapositions. . . . The novel melds existential anxiety to political terror in a measure peculiar to Bolaño. Imagine the protagonist of Poe’s 'Tell-Tale Heart' if he were being interrogated by the secret police on suspicion of having hidden subversives behind his wall."

The Mookse and the Gripes - Trevor Berrett

"It is more accessible than anything else of his I've read. We're sailing smoothly on Bolaño's flowing prose."

Dallas Morning News - Roberto Ontiveros

"In Monsieur Pain, a heightened sense of analogy aligns careless deserters, serious moviegoers, and sold-out psychics to a world of labyrinthine visions and designer fish tanks."

National Post - Carolina de Robertis

"Monsieur Pain, an early novella, beautifully translated by Chris Andrews, joins his other works in all their aching splendour."

The New York Review of Books - Sarah Kerr

"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."

The Quarterly Conversation - Stephen Henighan

"A real discovery and a substantial addition to the growing Bolaño library in English."

Three Percent - Dan Vitale

"Bolaño's gleeful but deadpan bouillabaisse of French surrealism, expressionism, and Kafkaesque unease."

Booklist - Brad Hooper

"Delightfully noirish."

The Plain Dealer - Craig Morgan Teicher

"A very good read and essential for Bolaño completists."

Elimae - Cooper Renner

"Employing a reserved and stately voice reminiscent of pre-Modernist fiction, Pain's tale is itself mesmerizing, debonair and entertaining."

The New York Times Magazine - Francisco Goldman

"Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own."

Esquire - John M. Richardson

"John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols."

San Francisco Chronicle

"This beautifully translated early novella, set in Paris... joins the late author's other works in all its aching splendor."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176285703
Publisher:	Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
Publication date:	09/23/2021
Series:	Hispánica
Edition description:	Unabridged
Language:	Spanish

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