Monsieur Pain Book

Uffff... Uh, what to say about this one? That it's as accessible as his best novella "Amulet"; that, like his other smaller efforts (not, obviously, the behemoths "Savage Detectives" or "2666") there's just not that much there, that you as a reader must work with as little as possible to tie up strands & place together symbols and plots with other works of his; that at the crossroads between cinematography, the sciences, and literature (prose AND poetry) we set our scene with as much tragedy eating at the edges as a caterpillar eats up a leaf, without, of course, falling headfirst into the melodramatic.

No, Bolaño is everything but melodramatic. In his poetics, we see ingrained Assassins (the biological type, such as the sickness that befalls the healthy, plus literal killers of men) of Authentic Creators (of art, of science, of oracular innovations in the past 20th century). Yep, the observations sometimes here border on the clinical--"Mon. Pain" creates nausea but perpetuates a literary... heft. What I find most intriguing, most beguiling actually, is how Bolaño calculates in eerily imprecise ways just HOW PEOPLE MANAGE TO GET SHUFFLED BY TIME.

"I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous, and not altogether devoid of elegance..." (59)