Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño… Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean writer who died not that long ago in 2003, at the early age of only fifty. I first came across him when I saw in a number of bookshops, his novel 2666. Eventually I bought it in Belfast Airport, and eventually I got round to reading it. I say eventually because it’s a huge book, more than nine hundred pages long. It was published in 2004 in England, the year after his death.

I started 2666 and found it was addictive; despite its length and complexity, its multitude of characters and narrators, its settings ranging across the world and across time, it was so gripping, that I had to tear myself away from it to eat, sleep, work. A fantastic book; I’ve never read anything like it… its end was a mystery but somehow the right ending for such a masterpiece… I only later discovered that the end was where he had stopped writing and in fact it was unfinished!

Last time we met for my Sunday book club at Waterstones, I happened to mention Bolaño. Obviously it’s too much to expect 2666 to be a book club choice, but we decided to read another novel by him. There were extremely disturbing and violent scenes in 2666, and it suddenly occurred to me that there might be similar scenes in his other books… I had started to read ‘The Savage detectives’ based on an actual incident in his life but had found it too disturbing and violent…

The novel we chose was quite short, it was ‘Monsieur Pain’… the title in English is ambiguous because of course although ‘pain’ is French for bread, ‘pain’ in English means something completely different.

it is only a short novel and is set in Paris in 1938; Pierre Pain, the main character is a mesmerist and acupuncturist and he is asked by a friend of his to visit  the husband of a friend of hers who is seriously ill and at death’s door with a severe and prolonged case of hiccups. The husband is César Vallejo, who was an actual person, a very famous Chilean poet. In Bolaño’s novel Vallejo dies, as he actually did in 1938 – but of an unknown illness… not necessarily hiccups.

I can’t begin to explain Monsieur Pain; it is like entering someone else’s dream, or seeing a movie in a foreign language, a movie which has some reels missing and is viewed through a haze of mystery. it is wonderfully written, and beautifully translated, totally mysterious, utterly captivating, gripping… I think I might have to read it again to find out what it’s all about… or just to enjoy it again… enjoy…. actually enjoy is maybe the wrong word because it is a strange and rather weird book.

I look forward to hearing what my book club friends have to say!