Latest Review: "The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra" by Pedro Mairal

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Katherine Rucker on The Missing Years of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, translated by Nick Caistor, from New Vessel Press.

Katherine is another of the students in the University of Rochester’s MA in Literary Translation Studies program, whose name you may recognize from this recent post asking for any information on non-Argentine Spanish lit. In addition to bringing some very interesting samples into our Plüb Translation Workshop, Katherine has a knowledge of whiskeys not to be trifled with (being raised in Kentucky), and owns a baby donkey back home.

Here’s a little bit from Katherine’s review:

Pedro Mairal’s short novel The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is more about these blank spaces than the usual full ones. It’s a novel where the things that are left out are just as important as the pieces we’re given. Through a series of vignette-like chapters which are set, unlike most contemporary Argentine novels, outside of the scope of Buenos Aires, Mairal shows us what life is like in the parts of the country that don’t get as much attention. Life in the small village of Barrancales centers around sneaking things across the Uruguayan border, fishing on the bank of the river, and crazy old men whose shotguns have been rigged so they can’t actually shoot innocent passersby. There’s also an old shed that’s been locked and abandoned for years, protecting sixty canvas scrolls from the weather.

It’s these scrolls the protagonist, Miguel, is after when he returns to the village following the death of his parents. That’s when he unearths the life work of his late father, Juan Salvatierra: a continuous mural that begins shortly after the accident that rendered the artist mute and carries on until just days before his death. The sequence—dreamlike, beautiful, at times laden with artistic metaphor, speaks about what Salvatierra himself couldn’t.

For the rest of the review, go here.