Strange, exotic, paranoid - Roberto Bolano's world

"Monsieur Pain" starts off like so many Roberto Bolano stories, strange, exotic, somewhat paranoid, among a world of expatriate artists and writers, as the eponymous M. Pain, who is of all things an acupuncturist practicing in Paris in 1938, is approached by a widowed acquaintance who wants him to help the dying husband of a friend of her; the husband, dying of a case of the hiccups in some Parisian sanatorium, turns out to be Cesar Vallejo, the great Chilean (I think) poet of the 20th-century. For some unexplained reason, there also appears to be a team of Spanish-speaking agents - police? something else? - who are following M. Pain, and he has no idea why. That's the set-up. A very short novel, and if the author's note is to be believed (you never know with Bolano), as well as the story in his most recent (posthumous) collection is also accurate, this novella won him some kind of cash award in Toledo (Spain) - there seem to be a lot of these publicly sponsored writing awards in Spain, unless Bolano is having us on? I always love the world that Bolano creates - sometimes he doesn't know quite where to go when he establishes his premise, but in other stories or novelas (he's weaker in the longer novels I think) he's truly among the greats. My interest in this one is also sparked by my interest in Vallejo. I don't know too much about him, but have always enjoyed coming across his poems here and there, and I remember a reading many years ago at which Robert Bly read his translation of a great Vallejo poem: What if after all these words the word itself is unable to survive? Took me a long time to find a copy of the translation - my memory had smoothed some of the infelicities and made it better, as it turns out. Great poem.