{"id":276156,"date":"2010-01-21T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/01\/21\/latest-review-monsieur-pain-by-roberto-bolano\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:10:04","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:10:04","slug":"latest-review-monsieur-pain-by-roberto-bolano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/01\/21\/latest-review-monsieur-pain-by-roberto-bolano\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Monsieur Pain" by Roberto Bola\u00f1o"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Review Section<\/a> is a piece on Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s first novel to come out in 2010: Monsieur Pain<\/em>,<\/a> translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. <\/p>\n

This review is by Dan Vitale,<\/a> a writer and editor who has written a number of pieces for Three Percent. And he definitely makes this sound like a strange, intriguing Bola\u00f1o novel:<\/p>\n

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According to Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2019s introductory note, the original title of Monsieur Pain<\/em> was The Elephant Path<\/em>—a term for those well-worn shortcuts that pedestrians tread, say, across a grassy area between two paved sidewalks, examples of the human tendency to blaze our own trails heedless of the city planners\u2019 best calculations of where we ought<\/em> to go.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

This short, intriguing book, which Bola\u00f1o says in his note he had written in 1981 or 1982, appears to be one of his earliest attempts at a novel. In his introductory note he also hints that the genesis of the book came from the memoirs of the wife of the Peruvian poet C\u00e9sar Vallejo.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The plot is rudimentary. In Paris, in the spring of 1938, our narrator Pierre Pain, a dabbler in acupuncture and mesmerism, is asked by his friend Madame Reynaud to attend at the hospital bedside of her friend Madame Vallejo\u2019s husband. It is Madame Reynaud\u2019s hope that, using the occult sciences, Pain may cure the patient\u2019s chronic hiccups, a case that has confounded his doctors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The bit about the “epilogue for voices” is particular interesting, and ties into some of the things I mentioned in the BTBA<\/span> write-up about The Skating Rink<\/em> . . . Anyway, click here<\/a> for the full review. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s first novel to come out in 2010: Monsieur Pain, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. This review is by Dan Vitale, a writer and editor who has written a number of pieces for Three Percent. And he definitely makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[27236,766,26606,6786,29776,1646,756],"class_list":["post-276156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-chilean-literature","tag-chris-andrews","tag-dan-vitale","tag-latin-american-literature","tag-monsieur-pain","tag-review","tag-roberto-bolano"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312976,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276156\/revisions\/312976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}