Saturday, February 06, 2010

A Touch of Evil
By Will Blythe
Published New York Times Book Review: February 5, 2010

MONSIEUR PAIN
By Roberto Bolaño.
Translated by Chris Andrews

134 pp. New Directions. $22.95

The beauty of Roberto Bolaño’s slender mystery novel “Monsieur Pain,” originally published in 1999 and now translated from the Spanish by the estimable Chris Andrews, is that it doesn’t behave much like a mystery novel. By the end of the book, which Bolaño wrote in either 1981 or 1982, the mysteries remain unsolved, the ostensible victim may or may not have suffered from foul play and the protagonist intent on figuring out who done it (if anyone did anything at all) appears incapable of doing so.

Illustration by Kim DeMarco

That would be Monsieur Pierre Pain, a middle-aged veteran of the First World War, his lungs seared at Verdun, now scratching out a threadbare existence in Paris by virtue of a modest government pension. In a bachelor’s dusty, jumbled room, he occupies himself by studying the occult. He has gained a minor reputation for the exotic practices of acupuncture and mesmerism, the art of hypnosis.

In April 1938, a beautiful widow with whom Pain is shyly in love comes to him with an urgent request. Her friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet named Vallejo, appears on the verge of hiccuping himself to death from an undiagnosed illness. This, of course, is the same César Vallejo who will one day be famous as perhaps the greatest Latin American poet, but here he is merely one of the first of the failed revolutionary writer-heroes — anonymous, exiled and suffering — who will become the prime movers of Bolaño’s later fiction. The mystique of the down-at-the-heels author always quickens Bolaño’s imagination. What novelist has ever shown more love for writers as characters?

Pain accompanies the widow to the hospital, where his initial attempt to resurrect Vallejo is scoffed at by a French doctor: “I’ve never had much time for charlatans, personally.” Embarrassed in front of the object of his affections, Monsieur Pain retreats. That night, two enigmatic Spaniards who have been shadowing him all day offer him an envelope of cash if he will refuse to treat Vallejo. Pain’s services having already been refused, he sees no harm in accepting the bribe.

Of course, he is summoned again to Vallejo’s bedside, where he attempts to mesmerize the dying poet. At this point, the narrative, already a surrealist’s attic of unlikely juxtapositions, turns even more dreamlike. The expectations of a conventional mystery are thwarted at every turn. Confrontations between principals fizzle. Ominous, possibly gratuitous, figures pop up in stairwells, bars, cafes, movie houses, only to vanish until their obituaries appear at the story’s end in a style that fore­shadows Bolaño’s novel “Nazi Literature in the Americas.” Gestures are ambiguous. Unease rules. Trails go cold. Inertia often seems the only course.
Read on , NYT.

3 comments:

Fergus said...

This is a beautiful and strange little novel. Also recommended to NZ readers is The Skating Rink, a murder mystery involving a grandiose civic sporting facility.

Alessandra said...

I am curious! Did you read it Graham?

Beattie's Book Blog said...

Not yet but I have his previous title beside my bed in a pile waiting to be read.