Monsieur Pain

In April 1938 Pain is approached by Madame Reynaud, whose late husband he had failed to help, to assist the Peruvian poet César Vallejo who is in the hospital, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness and unable to stop hiccuping.

Though he accepts the bribe, Pain attempts to treat the poet but is barred from the hospital and loses contact with Madame Reynaud.

By the end of the book, which Bolaño wrote in either 1981 or 1982, the mysteries remain unsolved, the ostensible victim may or may not have suffered from foul play and the protagonist intent on figuring out who done it (if anyone did anything at all) appears incapable of doing so.

[2] Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for The Guardian that "this early Bolaño novel has a moral and political urgency that obliges me to accept its noir banalities.

The book has also been translated into French by Robert Amutio (Serpent à plumes, 2008), Persian by Milad Zakaria (Ofoq Publications, 2012) and Japanese by Kenji Matsumoto (Hakusuisha, 2017).