The Missing Year Of Juan Salvatierra

(Paperback)

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Description

At age nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of long rolls of canvas, minutely detailing six decades of life in his village on Argentina's river frontier with Uruguay. After his death, his sons return to the village from Buenos Aires to deal with their inheritance: a shed packed with canvases stretching over two miles in length, depicting personal and communal history. Museum curators come calling to acquire this strange, gargantuan artwork but an essential one of its rolls is missing...

Reviews

Mairal's quickening prose moves from the ordinary to the opulent . . . without skipping a beat. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra will surely leave some readers thinking of Henry James's tragicomic accounts of the artist's life."
--Jed Perl, The New Republic

Mairal isn't your old college literature professor's idea of an Argentine novelist.
--The Los Angeles Times

Affirms Pedro Mairal's stature as one of the most significant Argentine writers working today.
--David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place and The Two Hotel Francforts

This enigmatic novel delights in its understated style.
--Publishers Weekly

Pedro Mairal's The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra... repeatedly provides the reader with such a satisfying sense of closure that one is temped to dive right back in after finishing that slender novel so as to luxuriate in those 39 last phrases and paragraphs ... Mairal is a master craftsman comparable to compatriot Jorge Luis Borges.
--The Critical Flame

"The language is brilliant; pages overflow with fresh ideas and colorful descriptions ... The story is compelling, of course, but it is the language, my god the language that does the gripping. It is Mairal's descriptions--so vivid, so rich and exact--that make this book so enchanting a read."
--The Coffin Factory

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is an engaging celebration of art as a force of nature, the fragile yet indomitable demand for possibility despite the constraints of a torpid existence.
--The Arts Fuse

At large (and for such a small book it's remarkably outsize), The Missing Year is a bucolic, yet sumptuous family drama on the River Uruguay that is also a quiet farce of the international art market.
--Bookslut

Author Bio

Pedro Mairal made a splash with his debut novel, Una noche con Sabrina Love, which tells the story of an 18-year-old boy who wins a night with a porn star of his dreams. That book was made into a film by Alejandro Agresti and was widely translated. Mairal, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1970, is a professor of English literature; he has been recognized as one of the most original voices in Latin American literature today, and in 1998 was awarded the Premio Clarin. He is also the author of the book of short stories Hoy temprano and the novel El ano del desierto. In 2007 he was included in the Bogota 39, which named the best Latin American authors.