Monsieur Pain [Paperback]

The principal audience for this book is readers who have tackled and enjoyed Bolaño's mature novels, most notably "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" -- and who would now like to engage in a bit of literary archeology. If you are such a reader, and want to trace back, to their earliest expression, Bolaño's mature themes, motifs and obsessions, then "Monsieur Pain" will offer you many rewards. Dreams, delirium, labyrinths, assassinations, artists versus fascists, secret histories, alienation, a blurred line between realism and fantasy -- it's all here in a rudimentary state.

But I'm reluctant to recommend this short (134-page) novel to a novice reader. The reason is this: Bolaño's strength is in what one critic called his "summative" powers -- his ability to encompass a mass of subjects, to assemble a formidable mountain of prose that draws you into a relentlessly engrossing world.

There are writers who excel at shorter forms (short stories; sonnets) but who fail at more sustained efforts (novels; epic poems). Bolaño may be an example of the opposite -- an author who is most convincing when creating lengthy works of cumulative power, but who may strike you as meandering, indulgent, and unfulfilling, when he invites you on a shorter excursion. I suspect many new readers will find "Monsieur Pain" to be a fragment-like experience without much pay-off. In short, this is not the best of Bolaño.

That is not to say the book lacks felicities apt to please a new reader. If you are comfortable with unconventional fiction, tolerant of detours and ambiguity, and intrigued by what happens when Poe meets Borges meets Paul Auster meets Thomas Pynchon -- then take the plunge.

Among the pleasures of "Monsieur Pain" is how economically Bolaño sketches scene after scene, managing to disorient the reader while generally maintaining narrative equilibrium. For me, the experience of reading "Monsieur Pain" was akin to watching a film noir, one with an experimental bent. One reviewer likened it to to the style and effect of David Lynch. As for his treatment of details, some scenes reminded me of Hitchcock, especially in the way Bolaño "edits" the sights and sounds of a sequence, and the way he uses physical surroundings to echo psychological space, and vice versa. At the very least you are likely to come away impressed by how skillfully the author (who viewed himself principally as a poet) taps into the strange beauty of the world, and conveys this with a sensitive descriptive power.

Bolaño's wizardry with a pen shines through clearly in Chris Andrews' translation. Pierre Pain, the shy narrator, describes a surprise appearance of his romantic interest, Madame Reynaud, at his garret: "The light delineating her silhouette had the gray intimacy of certain Parisian mornings." Later that day, called to the bedside of a dying poet, he is struck by how "the silence in the room seemed to be full of holes." The patient's face "displayed the strange disconsolate dignity shared by all those who have been confined in a hospital for some time." Later, anger and resentment seize the narrator, which he describes as "gradually hardening me from within like a carcass being stuffed by a taxidermist." Toward the end of the book he enters the rear of a darkened movie theater, his eyes adjusting to this scene:

"An aisle divided the rows of seats, from which the heads of the viewers protruded like nocturnal flowers; they were sparsely scattered, unclassifiable, mostly alone and isolated in their places."

That neatly captures Bolaño's vision of the world.

(Mike Ettner)

'Monsieur Pain' is a novel that makes me question why it is exactly that I read novels. Depending on the answer, this particular work is either disappointing and vague, or else haunting and evocative. I suspect that most people who decide to make the plunge into Roberto Bolaño's works, and who start, as I have, with 'Monsieur Pain', will land in the first camp. Try as I might, I simply could not decipher Bolaño's point, and I even read the book again a few days after finishing it the first time, just to be sure I hadn't missed some critical revelation. Bolaño's talent as a writer is never in question, which only adds to my frustration - it feels as though there are great forces skimming just below the conscious level of the text, but which ultimately serve no linear purpose. Instead, it's as if Bolaño wanted to merely suggest these forces, the same way that complex music may suggest an awareness that is inexpressible by other means. As a literary technique, I think this can be significant and revelatory, but with 'Monsieur Pain, I thought it was self-satisfied rather than expansive.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the eponymous character, a doctor specializing in alternative medicines, who is called on to treat the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, during his final days in 1938 Paris. Vallejo, an actual figure from history, was an outspoken anti-fascist, and decidedly on the side of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and the novel appears to conform to the conventions of historical intrigue when two mysterious Spaniards visit Doctor Pain and try to dissuade him from seeing the poet. Pain takes their bribe money, but sees Vallejo anyway, whom he feels as though he has a chance of curing. From this point, the story breaks up into dreamlike sequences where Pain is blocked in all his efforts to pursue either the treatment of Vallejo or the threads of his personal life. The forces aligned against him seem so monolithic and immoveable that I began to suspect that Pain really was dreaming, or that he was under some kind of hypnotic spell, or that he was a madman, and the entire episode was only in his imagination.

There are other themes at work here too - near the end of the book, Pain stumbles onto an old associate, who is now an intelligence officer for Franco's army. Between Vallejo and this man, Pleumeur-Bodou, they seem to represent the two sides of the civil war - one frail, sickly, a poet, and the other a great block of a man, versed in the power of suggestion, confident and powerful. Pain's ineffectual intellectualism in the middle could be Bolaño's indictment of all such uncommitted parties, especially in regards to the upheavals he witnessed in Latin America, of which the Spanish conflict is only a substitute. Or perhaps in my effort to shoehorn this novel into a coherent narrative, I've read too much into it. I don't know, but after going over it twice, this is the closest I've come to discovering a point to the book, though I'll admit it seems like a tenuous interpretation - and even if I did know that this was the author's intention, I'd still question its implications.

Bolaño is also very clever in this short text, which is interesting when I notice it, but which also makes me wonder what I've missed, and contributes to the feeling of frustration. An example - Pain has studied the work of Franz Mesmer, from whom we get the idea of mesmerism. In one of Pain's odd, paranoid excursions into unfamiliar sections of Paris to avoid the Spaniards, he stops in a small cafe and talks to two young men. They are conceptual artists, and show off an example of their work displayed in the cafe. They call it an underwater sculpture, and it is a miniature scene inside a fish tank of a catastrophic train wreck, complete with bodies strewn about. This scene, and the characters of the two young men, seem to exist only in order to communicate that the name of the train is the 'Meersburg Express'. Meersburg is also the town in which Franz Mesmer died. It was pure luck that I discovered this connection, and the few others that I was able to pick up only intensified the feeling that I was missing a great deal more. As I say, clever is fine, I suppose, but it also wears on me after a bit, especially if I think the author is having a laugh at the reader's expense.

Three stars may be harsh for 'Monsieur Pain' - the writing is excellent and I never felt that Bolaño lost control of his narrative. In fact, I think he said exactly what he wanted to say - I just never knew what that was.

This was my first book by Roberto Bolano, and I came to it eagerly after reading several intriguing reviews. Perhaps I should have started with his earlier works in order to build an understanding of the author's style. As it is, my biggest appreciation is that "Monsieur Pain" was blessedly short!!

The novel is drenched in Kafka allusions of isolation, surrealism, the pall of unspecified dread everywhere. And certainly, the time in which the novel takes place...the Spanish Civil War raging, and the marching jackboots of Hitler's troops throughout Europe...is enough to inspire very REAL fearfulness.

Yet, there was never enough cohesion to instill a point of lucidity, a place to attach all of that dread. Undoubtedly, that was Bolano's point, his plan. After all, he experienced his own personal Kafkaesque period living under the dictatorship of Pinochet. I've no question that the free-floating anxiety that infuses "Monsieur Pain" was a very real way of life in Chile during those horrific years.

All in all, I can recommend this book with the qualifier that the reader may or may not know anything more by the time s/he reaches the final page. But, again, it can be read in a single sitting, so perhaps the solution is to turn back to page 1 and try again!!

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 10 reviews  3.2 out of 5 stars