Monsieur Pain

Description: "Originally published in 1999 by Editorial Anagrama, Spain. English translation originally published in 2011 by New Directions"--Title page verso.

Brief description: 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.

Review Quotes:

"Full of moral and political urgency . . . Excellent."
--Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian

"The beauty of [this] slender mystery novel . . . is that it doesn't behave much like a mystery novel . . . This is the novel as Max Ernst or de Chirico might have written it . . . It is Bolaño's great gift to make us feel the dimensions of [a] darkness even when we cannot see exactly what it hides."
--Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review

"[Monsieur Pain] offers considerable pleasures . . . It plays with genre the way a cat plays with a mouse . . . [It] opens onto a nocturnal world of intrigue."
--Adam Mansbach, Los Angeles Times

"[A] brilliant, noir-steeped fictional world . . . It remains our great task--and our great thrill and joy--to continue the hunt, through the glorious mazes Bolaño crafted for us."
--Carolina de Robertis, San Francisco Chronicle