Monsieur Pain

“Full of moral and political urgency . . . Excellent.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian In 1938 Paris, Pierre Pain, a lonely bachelor and a beleaguered mesmerist, receives a telegram from his friend Madame Reynaud. An acquaintance of hers lies in a hospital bed beset with a mysterious—and apparently terminal—case of the hiccups, and she entreats Pain to cure him. Quietly in love with Reynaud, and buoyed by her faith in him, he agrees to see the patient, the exiled Peruvian poet César Vallejo. So