The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

By Pedro Mairal

At the age of nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of long rolls of canvas in which he minutely detailed 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 painted rolls of canvas stretching over two miles in length and depicting personal and communal history. Museum curators from Europe come calling to acquire this strange, gargantuan artwork. But an essential roll is missing. A search ensues that illuminates the links between art and life, as an intrigue of family secrets buried in the past cast their shadows on the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Vessel Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781939931061

Pedro Mairal

Pedro Mairal is a professor of English literature in Buenos Aires. In 1998 he was awarded the Premio Clarín and in 2007 he was included in the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 list, which named the 39 best Latin American authors under 39. Among his novels are A Night with Sabrina Love, which was made into a film and widely translated, and The Woman from Uruguay, which was a bestseller in Latin America and Spain and has been published in twelve countries.

Reviews for The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The sons of Juan Salvatierra have returned to their home village in an Argentinian border town to claim their inheritance, a decade after their father's death. Salvatierra, rendered mute by a childhood accident, spent much of his free time during the last 60 years of his life painting on long scrolls of canvas, one scroll for each year of his life beginning at the age of twenty. His works, housed in a shed, give voice to the history of his town and the lives of his family and close friends, in a continuous fashion akin to a book of non-fiction:Salvatierra painted without any lateral divisions so as to achieve continuity between the different scenes. That was something that obsessed him. He wanted his painting to encapsulate the fluidity of a river, of dreams, the way in which they can transform things in a completely natural way without the change seeming absurd but entirely inevitable, as if he were revealing the violent metamorphosis hidden within each being, thing, or situation.Salvatierra received little attention for his work during his life, but after his death several European museums expressed interest in purchasing and displaying his canvases, while his own country's institutions seemed largely disinterested in it. As the two sons examine the canvases, they discover that the scroll painted in 1961 is missing. The youngest son embarks on a quest to find this scroll, in order to complete the collection, but also to investigate what led to its disappearance. In doing so, he learns about his father's life, family secrets, and how his past life fits into the story told in the canvases.The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is a short but multilayered and evocative novel, which would appear to be a mystery novel but is also an homage to the life of an artist who is voiceless, yet uses his paintings to tell his story and communicate with those who view his work. The rich descriptions provided by Mairal allowed this reader to easily envision and reflect on Salvatierra's paintings, and, like a work of art that reveals more of itself on a repeat viewing, this book would seem to lend itself to a second or third reading to appreciate it more fully.

[klburnside · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is the story of an Argentinian artist, his painting, and his impact on his son.

The story is narrated by the son of Juan Salvatierra. Salvatierra is a painter who has recently died, leaving his life's great work on dozens of canvas scrolls in the barn on his property. Every day, Salvatierra added to his paintings, from left to right, until eventually his rolls of canvas provided a sort of narrative of his life and the happenings of the world around him.

When his sons return to the village to try to sell his paintings to a Dutch gallery, they discover that one scroll is missing. Their quest to find the scroll leads them to uncover unknown details about their fathers past.

I wish I could see the panting in this book. The way it is described as telling the story of Salvatierra's life and moods is absolutely incredible. It's not so much described as a linear narrative, but rather a collection of people, events, and scenes that come together to mean something. Alas, it is a work of fiction.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The short, sharp and often beautiful descriptions of the 2 miles of continuous paintings of Juan Salvatierramay well make readers long for a movie or illustrated book!As his first two sons eventually come to search for the mysterious missing 1961 roll of canvas, it also becomes a mystery whythey did not immediately move this valuable inheritance into a concrete guarded building. Fire always loomed as a strong possibility, as did theft.This obvious choice would also have delivered a different and way less predictable and disappointing ending.

[seeword · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Somehow, without intruding on the story, the language in this short novel makes the painting so real that you feel you are actually seeing the painting. As you view it, the artist’s son is sitting beside you, telling you a remarkable story of how it came to be created, how a part was missing, and how he and his brother went searching for the missing part. Their search is a journey of discovery, both for them and for the reader.