Monsieur Pain - Softcover

“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