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Monsieur Pain

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“Never have I felt so proud and so wretched to be a writer. There’s not a lot more I can say about Monsieur Pain.”
—ROBERTO BOLANO, from the Preliminary Note to Monsieur Pain

In the years since his death, Roberto Bolano has erupted out of obscurity, becoming one of the most auspicious voices in a new American canon. A Latin American poet best known for his novels, Bolano’s works have been hailed as the most groundbreaking of his generation, and are an absolute necessity for lovers of emerging literature.

The story is narrated by its namesake, Pierre Pain, a mesmerist in 1930’s Paris. When he is asked to help cure a mysterious long-term case of hiccups afflicting the poet Cesar Vallejo, the unwitting protagonist finds himself engulfed in a world of conspiracy. In Monseuir Pain, Bolano carries through his own imagining of Vallejo’s Paris with the same vivid fervor and suspense one would expect to find in the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe or the films of David Lynch.

While his more famous works, 2666 or The Savage Detectives, may be considered his most masterful, Monsieur Pain is an award winning novella which captures all of the themes which distinguish Bolano from his contemporaries, encompassing both his fascination with crime fiction and his vested delineations of the life of the literati, both real and imagined. Despite its tendency toward the surreal, Monsieur Pain is both accessible to novice readers and necessary for the hardcore Bolano fan.

Bolano, Roberto. Monsieur Pain. Picador. Paperback, octavo. List price: $14.00. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Stephanie S. is a part-time bookseller at our University Village store. She also teaches poetry in the Chicago Public Schools.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

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Gulliver’s Travels

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“…by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” – Gulliver’s Travels

When we think about Jonathan Swift’s brilliant Gulliver’s Travels, we, or at least, I, first usually recall short little soldiers tying down an absurdly giant man. Those more familiar with the book (again: I!) will also remember the classic book as a satiric gem that gives a bitter look at humankind. There is no doubt that Jonathan Swift was misanthrope. He found people petty, mean, and truly disgusting (like smelly and ugly even). But what I found most interesting about “Gulliver’s Travels” in subsequent readings was that, despite its underlying hatred for humanity, behind all of that, at its very core, is a very humanistic book.

Swift spends a lot of time describing these strange new worlds, each more bizarre than the last. Even more strange (but familiar) is the 18th century society that Swift savagely picks apart. What’s interesting is that Swift is not coming from a place of cynicism, or even hopelessness. What’s evident is that the book is coming from an almost primal indignation. Swift, hater of humanity, questions our utter inhumanity. He not only questions it, he demands that we do too. He wants us to be better.

Gulliver’s Travels is fun, ridiculous, and powerful. It will make you question our own modern evils and wish that Swift was around today, to ask the right questions, and to give voice to the rage we should be feeling in our own hearts.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Penguin. Paperback, octavo. List price: $14.00. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Timothy works proudly at our University Village store. He writes, edits, and is cute too, some say.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

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The French Lieutenant’s Woman

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John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman goes far beyond the normal period novel’s dalliances in romance and the upper class and delves into the then rapidly advancing intellectual culture of Victorian Britain. Sarah Woodruff, the novel’s protagonist, invokes the spirit of the “fallen women” marked irrevocably by society for her unconventional love affair with a French seaman. However, the heroine, much like the novel she’s encapsulated in, tenaciously and creatively seeks liberation from society’s formal expectations. Through the eyes of the male narrator, Fowles examines not only the fate of a progressive Hester Prynne, but also the major thinkers and artists that influenced the Victorian Era and Gilded Age like Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson and young Sigmund Freud. The novel’s famously unorthodox “choose-your-own-adventure” ending itself is the literary equivalent of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, echoing the evolution of both the novel’s heroine and an entire society at large.

Great for the casual and serious reader alike, The French Lieutenant’s Woman blows the myth of Victorian prudish sexuality wide open.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Back Bay. Paperback, octavo. List price: $15.95. Our in-store price: $4.95.

Mandy wears her heart on her sleeve at Powell’s Lakeview and Powell’s University Village.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!