The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Paperback – July 15, 2013 by Pedro Mairal (Author), Nick Caistor (Translator)
$15.49

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

Brand: New Vessel Press
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Authors: Pedro Mairal (Author), Nick Caistor (Translator)
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Vessel Press (July 15, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 118 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 193993107X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1939931078
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.4 x 7.9 inches

 

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.

 

Review

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

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

"This short novel about a vast painting is a pleasure to read and affirms Pedro Mairal's stature as one of the most significant Argentine writers working today. May this be but the first of his books to appear in English." - David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes and The Man Who Knew Too Much

"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 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

From the Author

"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

About the Author

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 Clarín. He is also the author of the book of short stories Hoy temprano and the novel El año del desierto. In 2007 he was included in the Bogotá 39, which named the best Latin American authors.

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