Monsieur Pain

Monsieur Pain
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2010
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811217140

To drag fiction toward the unknown, [Bolao] 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.--"The New York Review of Books."

Monsieur Pain

Monsieur Pain
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2012-02-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811218899

Roberto Bolano takes us into an odd, dark, but comic underworld in this strangely tender noir novel. A Bolano 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. . . .

Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge

Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge
Author: Antoine Dechêne
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2018-08-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 331994469X

This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs – the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text – that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.

The Secret of Evil

The Secret of Evil
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811220583

A collection that gathers everything Bolano was working on before his untimely death. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory... The various pieces in the posthumous Secret of Evil extend the intricate, single web that is the work of Roberto Bolano.

The Insufferable Gaucho

The Insufferable Gaucho
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811220532

These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat. The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho — unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire — might concern a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the familye state on the Pampas, now gone to wrack and ruin. These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.

Antwerp

Antwerp
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 125089817X

“It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving.” —Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the “big bang” of Roberto Bolaño’s universe, Antwerp is his first novel—or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.

The Unknown University

The Unknown University
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 839
Release: 2013-07-11
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0811219283

Collects the poetic works of the Chilean author, including works of prose poetry, fiction in verse, and pieces that defy categorization.

Monsieur Pain

Monsieur Pain
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2012-02-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811220559

Roberto Bolano takes us into an odd, dark, but comic underworld in this strangely tender noir novel. A Bolano 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. . . .

Framing Roberto Bolaño

Framing Roberto Bolaño
Author: Jonathan Monroe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2019-10-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1108498256

This is one of the first books to trace the development of Roberto Bolaño's work from the beginning to the end of his career. It will appeal to graduates and researchers working on Bolaño and Latin American Literature generally, particularly the novel, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.