“…he showed little interest in the work Madame Curie was doing at the time. His attention was focused on the other side of the marital bed, so to speak. He was interested in Pierre Curie and his last project. Do you know how Pierre Curie died?”
“No…”
“He was run over by a carriage. On the 19th of April 1906, in the morning, as he crossed Rue Dauphine. At the time he and another scientist by the name of D’Arsonval were investigating the psychic forces manifested in mediumistic trances. The project was left unfinished, and shelved. It was never mentioned again; setting aside the circumstances, it was rather unorthodox, and bore no relation to Curie’s earlier work. Or perhaps it did, but that only made it more preposterous. His partner D’Arsonval vanished like a puff of smoke, never to be heard of again. After the absurd accident that cost Curie his life, D’Arsonval disappeared, just like that. Perhaps that was what piqued our friend’s curiosity…”
There’s apparently no bottom to the well of Bolaño’s “first” written fiction. If it’s generally agreed the prose-poem Antwerp, written in 1980, is the “big bang” (to quote Ignacio Echevarría) of Bolaño’s universe, it’s harder to say which was his first novel. La pista de hielo first appeared in 1993, but the writing of El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción predated that publication by almost a decade, the same year a small press released his even earlier novel La senda de los elefantes as Monsieur Pain. Bolaño was only 28 years old when he wrote La senda de los elefantes, earning him the Felix Urubayen Prize and setting him down the fictional path for good. Already in Antwerp Bolaño was introducing his pet themes: a mystery introduced at the story’s outset, soon abandoned as dissolute clues and loose ends pile up. The titular Monsieur Pain was a real-life mesmerist who Bolaño sends across Paris, dreaming his way through metafictional movie theaters and cafes furnished with aquarium dioramas of train wrecks fashioned by creepy twins. Those looking for clues to Bolaño’s own mysterious biography will find plenty of traces of the author in the antifascists, failed poets and Spanish asylum-seekers. Even Pain himself becomes, in the eyes of his closest friend, “a poet whose work she never read, not a line, the lasting tender friendship of women, the gaps in any story, gaps that slowly close as years go by, narrowing, becoming less significant, not so much gaps as blanks.”
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