![]() ![]() ![]() The first page features an allusion to The Trial, crisply translated by Chris Andrews Set in Paris in 1938, the story follows mesmerist Pierre Pain on a failed quest to cure the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo of his chronic hiccups. Though Bolaño was a huge admirer of Borges, he drew more explicitly from Kafka for Monsieur Pain, which centers on a protagonist who is both powerless and oblivious to the greater forces that shape his fate. The mentor’s wife calls them the gunslingers, or buccaneers, and in the end he wins all the prizes, not the young writer There, an autobiographical narrator teams up with an older Chilean writer whom Borges was known to admire. Bolaño claims he never saw the book in published form, and continued pursuing “awards scattered over the map of Spain: buffalo prizes I had to go hunting like a redskin whose life is on the line.” The era is described in the short story “Sensini,” which opens Last Evenings on Earth. ![]() He wrote the book in the early ’80s, and it was awarded a prize by the Toledo City Council in Spain. Bolaño’s preliminary note to Monsieur Pain, a short novel was first published in 1999 and appeared last month from New Directions, alludes to the author’s early desperation and tenacity. ![]()
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