Monsieur Pain - Softcover

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His novel, The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times Book Review. His posthumous masterpiece, 2666, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Monsieur Pain plays with genre the way a cat plays with a mouse.”
- The Los Angeles Times

“A surrealistic attic of unlikely juxtapositions. . . . 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.”
- Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review

“John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols.”
- John M. Richardson, Esquire

“Delightfully noirish.”
- Brad Hooper, Booklist

“Roberto Bolano 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.”
- Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books

“Bolano wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.”
- Francisco Goldman, The New York Times Magazine

“This beautifully translated early novella, set in Paris... joins the late author's other works in all its aching splendor.”
- San Francisco Chronicle

“Monsieur Pain, an early novella, beautifully translated by Chris Andrews, joins his other works in all their aching splendour.”
- Carolina de Robertis, National Post

“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.”
- Roberto Ontiveros, Dallas Morning News

“A very good read and essential for Bolano completists.”
- Craig Morgan Teicher, The Cleveland Plain Dealer