The Book Beat reading group selection for July is Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño. We will meet virtually online via Zoom on Wednesday, August 28 at 7:00 pm. The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Please call or Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up.
The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation, and discussions are free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.
A Bolaño classic. The Peruvian poet César Vallejo is in the hospital, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness and unable to stop hiccuping. His wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud: the mesmerist Pierre Pain. Pain, a timid bachelor, is in love with the widow Reynaud and agrees to help. But two mysterious Spanish men follow him and bribe him not to treat Vallejo. Ravaged by guilt and anxiety, Pain does not intend to abandon his new patient, but his access to the hospital is barred and Madame Reynaud mysteriously leaves Paris. Another practitioner of the occult sciences enters the story (working for Generalissimo Franco, using his mesmeric expertise to interrogate prisoners)—as do Mme. Curie, tarot cards, an assassination, and nightmares. Meanwhile, a haunted Monsieur Pain wanders the crepuscular, rainy streets of Paris….
“I am being followed, I realized, with a blend of certitude and astonishment, like a soldier discovering that gangrene has taken hold of his leg.”
-Roberto Bolaño, Monsieur Pain
“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 New York Times
“One of Bolaño’s first novels, this already displays his brilliant, alchemical gift for transmuting the dead-ends of life into sinister mysteries.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“Monsieur Pain is by no means among Bolaño’s major novels, but it offers considerable pleasures. Like his later works, it plays with genre the way a cat plays with a mouse — batting around the conventions of noir and toying with thriller-structure, then turning away in search of the next amusement. That amusement is often another of Bolaño’s trademarks: an out-of-the-blue story-within-a-story, a scene-stealing speech by a secondary character or a door that opens onto a nocturnal world of intrigue.”—Los Angeles Times
“Surrealist narrative is a literary form at war with itself; disconnection is a primary tactic of surrealism, and story is a process of making connections, however unexpected. Readers open to the autodestructive element of modern art may find the surrealist devices in Monsieur Pain more deeply engaging than coherent narrative. I find them curiously old-fashioned, overly cinematic, and all too close to self-parody. But this early Bolaño novel has a moral and political urgency that obliges me to accept its noir banalities.”—Ursula K. LeGuin, review in The Guardian
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.