The New Republic has named The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal one of the Best Books!
“Narration and evocation perform a savory duet in the Argentine novelist Pedro Mairal’s story of an idiosyncratic artist’s immense autobiographical murals and a son’s quietly impassioned efforts to do justice to his late father and his work. This surefooted exploration of the painter as a quixotic dreamer gives a South American twist to Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, with the seventeenth-century Parisian genius of the Frenchman’s classic tale replaced by a twentieth-century Argentine provincial whose work has come to the attention of a major European museum. Mairal’s quickening prose moves from the ordinary to the opulent and back again without skipping a beat. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierrea will surely leave some readers thinking of Henry James’s tragicomic accounts of the artist’s life,” writes art critic Jed Perl.
