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    The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
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    The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
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    The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
    Audiobook3 hours

    The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

    Written by Pedro Mairal

    Narrated by Tony Chiroldes

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

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    About this audiobook

    At the age of nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident.

    At 20, 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.

    ©2008, 2013 2008 Pedro Mairal, 2013 Nicholas Caistor (P)2014 ListenUp Production, LLC

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLantern Audio
    Release dateSep 15, 2014
    ISBN9781942248125
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

    4/5

    39 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      The Missing Year of Juan SalvatierraA charming, imaginative and magical short novel by Pedro Mairal, an Argentine poet and novelist.Two brothers return to their hometown in Barrancales. Their mission is to find a home for their father’s paintings. A mute caused by a childhood accident his mother apprenticed him to a German painter while his father ignored him. Salvatierra, as he is known, worked for 40 years at the Post Office but his passion was a giant scroll of painting that memorialized the life he led and the town they came from. Miguel and Luis travel from Buenos Aires at intermittent times. Their father’s work has been designated a cultural artifact, yet it collects dust in the abandoned shed in which his father painted and hung out with assorted neighborhood characters. The brothers contact museums, one of which, located in Amsterdam expresses an interest in acquiring this unique work for their Latin American wing. The story unfolds with intrigue and a powerful ending that will be your delight to discover.Passages:“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.”“In the canvas from that time there is a slow transition from nocturnal scenes to those with the brightness of morning. First there are lengthily twilight landscapes with black women washing clothes on the riverbank. Salvatierra painted the hour when the first stars are reflected in the water, and everything is beginning to merge into the shadows. In one segment, somebody is striking a match, and in the darkness, you can just make out a woman, who is smiling provocatively from behind the bushes.”
    • 4/5
      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.

    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.