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"A simple mystery constructed very cleverly ... an atmospheric and understated book with vivid settings and characters, a true delight to read."–10 Best Books Shorter than 150 Pages, Publishers Weekly
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 the death of Salvatierra, 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. A search that illuminates the links between art and life ensues, as an intrigue of family secrets buried in the past cast their shadows on the present.
Pedro Mairal, born in Buenos Aires in 1970, is one of the most exciting Argentine novelists of his generation. In 2007 he was included in the Bogotá 39, which named the best Latin American authors.
"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