Monsieur Pain

Description

Cesar Vallejo, renowned Peruvian poet, lies dying in hospital - he's hiccupping himself to death. When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis, his wife pins her hopes on the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. But after the appearance of two mysterious Spaniards, Monsieur Pain finds his access to the hospital barred and things soon go awry . . . Set in the rainy, crepuscular streets of an unsettled 1938 Paris, Roberto Bolano's Monsieur Pain merges the best of Borges with Edgar Allan Poe, and its dark blend of unrequited desire, guilt, grief and betrayal makes this a gripping noir conspiracy as rich as it is strange.

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.

Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolano. * Sunday Times * Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is immensely readable. * Guardian * His fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental. * Times Literary Supplement *