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.
Read the whole article and see the entire list here.