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Monsieur Pain
  • Published: 3 October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529924459
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

Monsieur Pain

Formats & editions
Paperback
21 Jan 2025
EBook
3 Oct 2024
Audiobook
7 Oct 2025
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A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño’s work – now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time.

Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies in hospital, hiccupping himself to death.

When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis, his wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud, the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. Pain, in love and eager to impress, agrees to help. But on a night that 'smells of something strange', things soon go awry...

A wonderfully oneiric novella that blends the finest of Edgar Allan Poe with Jorge Luis Borges and Bolano's truly astonishing alchemical gifts, Monsieur Pain is a gripping noir conspiracy as rich as it is strange.

TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS

‘A surrealist nightmare, with overtones of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler’ The Times

This marvellous little yarn is dark, mysterious and rich in surprises... If you have yet to enter the daringly kaleidoscopic labyrinth that is Roberto Bolano's imagination, this is a lively place to begin what will be quite an experience’ Irish Times
  • Published: 3 October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529924459
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

About the author

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.
RBñ

Also by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives
By Night in Chile
The Collected Poems of Roberto Bolaño
Woes of the True Policeman
The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño
Cowboy Graves
A Little Lumpen Novelita
See all

Praise for Monsieur Pain

This marvellous little yarn is dark, mysterious and rich in surprises . . . If you have yet to enter the daringly kaleidoscopic labyrinth that is Roberto Bolano's imagination, this is a lively place to begin what will be quite an experience.

Irish Times

[Monsieur Pain is] a taste of what made him such a formidable talent.

Metro

Monsieur Pain is a mystery in which the mystery remains unsolved. The novel strikes a compelling balance of lucidity and strangeness.

Times Literary Supplement

Bolaño creates the atmosphere of a surrealist nightmare, with overtones of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler.

The Times

Whodunnit with no who or it and precious little dunn, but plenty to offer the lover of literary intrigue.

Word