A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey and Life After Growing up Abroad

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Elizabeth Liang reached out to me about her solo show, “Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey,” in the week I finished reading Humiliation by Paulina Flores, a book I’d sought out because I wanted to reach into the psyche of a country I once lived in and can never quite let go. Like me, Liang is a TCK, a “Third Culture Kid,” someone who grew up in more than one culture and doesn’t really feel like they have ownership in any culture. In Liang’s case, she is a global nomad who was born in Guatemala to a Chinese-Guatemalan father and an American mother and lived in six countries before going to college. I was born in the U.S. and only lived in two other countries but I felt a deep connection to Liang and was glad to journey with her through her childhood to try and understand mine.

The Intimacy of Personal Address

The majority of “Alien Citizen” is a direct address from Liang to the audience as though she was telling us her life story at a cocktail party. There’s a minimal black set and what look like family photos projected on a screen behind her to ground us in whatever country she’s currently been transplanted to. Liang uses accent, gesture, and language to characterize other people in her life, most evocatively her mother’s waved cigarette and her father’s pointed finger.

The difference between a cocktail party and a show, however, is that the latter requires the performer to keep the audience engaged for the entirety of the performance. Liang delivers on this exceedingly well. She is nakedly honest and sincere about her story and I was riveted as she took me through the highs and (many) lows of her life abroad as Xerox moved her family back and forth between Central America, North America and North Africa. Liang’s emotions are at times raw in all the ways they must have been when she was wrenched from a beloved home or friend or when she found herself becoming in a woman in two cultures that are not friendly to women.

Living an Unreal Life

I don’t talk about my own upbringing much at cocktail parties. When I consider telling people I grew up on three continents, I assume they’ll think I am lying or that the privilege of living abroad will be so unfathomable that I’ll seem like an awful little princess if I discount about any aspect of it. This is the same reaction I had while watching Liang. Even though I should know better, I found myself rankling she seemed to be complaining about her extraordinary life.

It was only by watching through to the end that I realized I was perpetuating (for both of us) the “trying to be the good guest like my parents taught me” that many TCKs feel. That we’re supposed to be cheery and positive and nice because we’re experiencing something beyond most people’s dreams—even as we’re being forcefully pulled away from most of the things we know at a time in our lives when we barely know ourselves. We become so “good at blending” that we “feel like [our] life never happened” and it’s our “fault because [we’re] so good at adapting” and the result is a feeling of “playing make-believe without knowing I’m playing.”

I wasn’t letting her be myriad in the ways that I don’t let myself be myriad.

Once you give yourself “permission to feel the pain, you can be so much more grateful” – Elizabeth Liang, Alien Citizen

I do feel many wonderful things about having had the privilege to travel and live abroad, so much so that I’ve wondered how I can incorporate this into my son’s life. But Liang helped me remember, too, that I don’t spend my spare time seeking out books that will help me understand the cultures I feel like run through my blood (even though I’m certain anyone from those places would consider me a mere Dolezal) because I feel complete and happy and understood.

Liang for allows us inside her struggles and triumphs brings them full circle in a way that helped me more fully understand mine. By being real about the pains, she freed me to experience the joys in the rich, nuanced way that is real life (and to think more holistically about the life I want for my son).

Multilingual Communication

Now that I feel more free to enjoy the fullness of the extraordinary childhood I was treated to, I will say also that I loved how Liang took the freedom to break into Spanish or Arabic during her story. When I was writing Polska, 1994, this is one of the big questions I had to answer—if I break into the language the way I feel it in my body, will I lose people? And the obvious answer is yes, you can, but if you’ve already built trust and momentum with an audience, as Liang did, the audience can and will follow

Geovani Martins addressed something similar in a recent interview in BOMB in reference to his use of Portuguese slang:

Every time a writer explained some slang, I felt like he was telling me: I’m writing this for a specific reader, someone who doesn’t speak like this. I told myself, “Man, I’m going to do the opposite, and use every word I want to use.” Because that’s what literature does. I love Shakespeare, right, but he didn’t make an effort to explain anything to me. If I don’t try to understand it myself, I won’t like him or read him. No great writer in the history of literature has explained things to people in that way. They just wrote their stories in their chosen language and people who liked reading them did so because they were willing to step into the story on those terms. I didn’t understand why it had to be different with me.

By using all her languages in “Alien Citizen,” Liang brings closer the people who can follow her and also envelops the stragglers, carrying them over the hump into something more—a world where we are not just different but also the same, one where tone and gesture speak as loudly as vocabulary.

I could go on for pages about the things I related to in Liang’s show (her relationship with her maids, an irrational fear of conflict, self-silencing and shyness, and more) and some of the things I did not (being racially “other” in the U.S. and transition fatigue). But I don’t want to rob you of the experience of watching it and seeing what you, global nomad or not, might relate to, too. Because we’re all a little alien sometimes, no matter where we come from or where we’re living right now. I learned a lot from Flores’ gorgeous book about the Chile I’ll never really know. From Liang I learned about who I was, am, and want to be. And I’m grateful.

Treading Lightly While Traveling through Haiti in Maps Are Lines We Draw

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maps are lines we draw - allison coffeltWhat does it mean to leave no trace? This laudable goal of many a traveler can go awry when we get caught up in the “what does it mean” and forget that “leave no trace” is meant to apply to the outer environment and not to ourselves. In reading Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip through Haiti, I have no doubt that Haiti left traces on Allison Coffelt’s heart and soul, but the book gets caught up enough in the headiness of her experience that I too often missed what the journey felt like. Worse, I missed the opportunity to feel myself transformed by her journey.

To be fair, much of Coffelt’s most obvious travel transformations probably happened before she even left home when she read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book that inspired Coffelt’s trip and in the international journeys she undertook before this one. And I deeply appreciate that she was trying to give us a more complex experience than the standard “I went abroad, I saw a lifestyle unlike my own, I was transformed” trope, but the fact that she’s visibly still processing this complex experience makes it harder to follow along with her, as does the fact that we are exposed as much to her thoughts about events (or even her thoughts on thinking about events) as we are to events themselves.

Scene vs. Summary

One of the lessons drilled into me in an early writing class is that readers need scene (the depiction of events) in order to engage with events rather than summary (the narration of outcomes) which can keep a reader on the outside of a story. It’s a lesson I rebelled against (like most lessons) and we can all cite examples of long, in-depth narrations that made a book for us. In truth, though, those examples are rarer and in our modern life of direct access to video and other first-person accounts, not to mention the unreliability of many “truths” spouted at us from innumerable political mouths, scenes connect readers with events in ways that allow us to both feel what’s happening and to trust the experience (even though all books, like all photographs, are in some way framed). Or maybe I’m just one of those “need to see the foreign brilliance before it’s spoiled by visitors” kind of people.

So in the moments when Coffelt is sharing glimpses of the scenes she experienced while in Haiti, I’m right there with her as she and Dr. Gardy pull to the side of the road to sample douce macoss or as she uses a headlamp to illuminate a man’s medical treatment. These scenes allowed me to feel like I myself was the traveler (without even a single visit to the travel clinic).

Contrast that with the moments where she’s reflecting on the tropes of the mission-trip story or the self-interrupting nature of travel writing (something she’s consciously doing). This latter brings me as a reader back to the level of watching the book being constructed—separating me from experiencing what I think Coffelt wants me to experience of Haiti.

Other Comments on Craft

Because I was often engaged with this book more at the craft level than the experience level, I was very interested in what Coffelt was doing with tense. In the moments when she does use scene, especially as she’s traveling with her guide, Dr. Gardy, the action that makes up the spine of this book, she uses present tense narration, which is a wonderful way to squeeze the most immersion possible from those scenes and a strong way to counteract the distancing effect of the rumination that intercedes. It’s a trick a lesser writer would not have thought to use.

Coffelt also knows her way around a metaphor. Whether it’s turning a moment of crushing garlic into a commentary on the messy history of Haiti or the staging of a photograph that encapsulates what it means to even write a book like this. These comparisons can allow us to fathom some of the complexity she’s grappling with without having it narrated for us.

Travel is Complex

Was it Pico Iyer who called out the difference between a tourist and a traveler? Maybe not, but it’s an important distinction in this type of literature. While many will feel that a book like Eat, Pray, Love delves into the realm of traveler, I’m actually looking for narratives that go even deeper than looking at how experiencing other cultures changes us as humans. I want the Anthony Bourdain effect of literature—to see those cultures as much as possible as they are and to learn from them what I’m missing about the world at large. This is something Lindsay Clark does brilliantly on No Madder Where and it’s something Coffelt clearly values as well.

I loved the way she included quotes like “The poor don’t want you to dress like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water.” reminded me of the Mormon missionaries we came to know in Chile. There was something so interesting and complex about these young, white, tie-wearing boys’ success in converting the poor that continues to inform my own (evolving) thoughts about religious fervence. I also appreciated her reminder about the roots of travel: travail (to work), and I was interested to learn about Haitian’s relationship with the American culture of disposal and the dependence of relief organizations on having a population that needs relief.

Before reading Maps Are Lines We Draw I knew about Haiti only from one chapter in Ann Hedreen’s Her Beautiful Brain and from decades of news accounts of disasters there. I’m glad to now have a fuller picture of the place. Do I love how honest Coffelt was about the inability to form a pat narrative about her Haitian experience? Yes. I actually do. Do I also wish that I’d been able to engage deeply enough with the book to come away with my own picture of Haiti? Yes. That too. But I did learn a lot about Haitian history, watch a fellow traveler grapple with some larger questions about travel, and get to pay some careful attention to craft, so there’s a lot to recommend in this book.

If you want to learn more about Haiti or just the intricacies of structuring a travel memoir, pick up a copy of Maps Are Lines We Draw from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Narrative of Genius in Chef’s Table on Netflix

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chefs table - netflixI started watching Chef’s Table because of the “cover” art—a beautifully constructed and impossibly tiny dish of food. Like many Americans, I’ve become enraptured in our recent conception of food as art and this show seemed like the culmination (or at least a new level) of that art. What I didn’t realize is how much I’d learn from this show about our culture of genius worship and how that translates to the characters we seek out in fiction, nonfiction, and life.

There are many sides to the genius character and his narrative, and it surprised me how neatly each of these chefs fit into the categories (or how neatly they were edited into them anyway).

The Misunderstood

I still thought I was watching a cooking show when Massimo Battura showed up on screen in the first episode. Although the voice of a food critic had already been introduced to help me understand that this man was special. We see him in the kitchen of his restaurant, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. We see him in the market gathering the best ingredients. We see him in the fields chatting with farmers. But it isn’t until we meet his wife, Lara Gilmore, that we really get to know Massimo. Because she is literally interpreting his actions for the people around them. Don’t get me wrong, their relationship is actually very charming and their love for each other is palpable, but it is their very closeness that highlights how far the rest of the world is from understanding him. At one point, I’d swear Bottura admits that he’d be nothing without her explaining his vision to others.

Bottura is the classic misunderstood genius. Filled with ideas too big for his small town, he has to travel to New York and then Paris to get recognized. He comes home with even bigger, more refined ideas and then he’s really too obscure for those at home who just want their Italian food the way it’s been cooked for thousands of years. A critic comes in and demolishes him. Finally, at long last, an even bigger critic comes in and sees the genius of the man.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? In some ways it’s what we all strive for—to be extraordinary and to have the world finally recognize it. You get the feeling that the world will never fully understand Bottura, but once we accept that he’s beyond us, we can worship at his feet and trust in his genius (now that it’s been recognized if not fully understood). In fact, he might lose some of his charm if we did understand him. He might become more like one of us.

The Intellectual

I didn’t understand what rankled me about environmentalist/chef Dan Barber until my husband started talking about him. The man, at least as edited for this series, comes off as a condescending prick. See, he knows things about food and the land that the rest of us are failing to see. He wants to educate us through his food (at two restaurants named Blue Hill in New England) and to help us save the world by eating good ingredients that are actually in season and good for the earth.

I can’t disagree with his basic premise, what tastes best about a strawberry in January is the memory of strawberries past, not the greenhouse grown, artificially huge one in front of you. But the way that Barber positions himself as a preeminent thinker (espousing ideas that got lost somewhere between my great-grandparents and me) drives me nuts. And I think it’s because I’m preconditioned to want to be this type of genius‐so I want to take down others I see as false.

It wasn’t until my husband remarked on how awful he was to the people around him that I realized both the fault in Dan Barber and how closely it relates to my worst days.

The Loner

The most beguiling genius of the series so far is Francis Mallmann—Patagonian-raised, French-educated. When I saw him make a panqueque con dulce de leche over open flame on an island surrounded by snow-capped peaks hundreds of miles from anywhere, I nearly bought a plane ticket.

Mallmann’s narrative focuses very much on him as a restless loner. It’s the only episode where we barely see the inside of a restaurant. The mother of his youngest child lives a country away and they see each other for maybe ten days a month. He espouses the open relationship and likes his freedom. But there are holes in this narrative, because out on La Isla (yes, I love the name of his island), he’s surrounded by acolytes. And it seems that he never actually stays out in that paradise of “isolation” for more than a few days at a time. Mallmann is a loner, but he is never alone. Because what is genius in isolation?

By far the most beautiful of the episodes of Chef’s Table, I wrestled with the distance between the image of his life and the actualities and this is the episode that got me thinking I need to write about this series. I needed to understand what was the call of these geniuses. I needed to know if their lives were really what I should strive for.

The Masculine

Niki Nakayama is the first female chef to be featured in the series. So why did I put her under the title “The Masculine”? It’s because in the world of genius (and even much more so in the world of chefs), the true genius is expected to be male. Nakayama has fought against that perception, but very quietly. She comes from a patriarchal family (her brother was supposed to succeed, they let her play at chef to get it out of her system) and was educated under sexist conditions (every one of her mentors, even the proudest, is still a little shocked that she’s a woman). There’s even stories of people walking out of her restaurant when they find out that the chef is a woman.

So what does Nakayama do? She closes the shoji screens and cooks quietly in the background. According to the critic assigned to her episode, she is no less of a genius chef than any man, but she fits outside the narrative enough to actually highlight how constrictive our expectations of greatness are.

The Cult of Genius

What I found interesting about each of these four types of genius is that each of these people actually has all of the characteristics to some degree. Nakayama is deeply misunderstood, Bottura is an intellectual, Mallmann fits a wide range of male stereotypes. It made me wonder if there are actually different types of genus, or if there is one archetype sitting atop a mountain that we’re striving for.

I also began to wonder why we’re striving to be at the top of that mountain and if we should be. There is great joy in the lives of some of these chefs (especially Bottura and Nakayama) but there also appears to be great pain either in getting where they are or in staying there. And there are so many people working with and for them who will never achieve those heights. Are we creating a culture of Captain Kirks when we really need are more Uhuras, Boneses, and Scotties?

The Genius in Literature

And of course the genius ties in so closely to literature. Our archetypal hero (and writer for that matter) is so often this brilliant, misunderstood loner—so beguiling, so out of touch with the world. He’s a godlike figure we strive to get to know even when he cannot know himself. Why do we worship this?

My Family, My Son

I was raised in a family of geniuses. Brilliant, highly educated parents, aunts, and uncles. Even more brilliant cousins and siblings. Our intellect and superiority was cultivated and honed (often at the expense of our emotions and communication skills). I like this world. I like the idea of mastering something and using that to express what’s deep in my soul. But I wonder, too, if that expression would feel even better, more natural, if it wasn’t such torture to access it and then express it. Could I be satisfied with good enough?

It’s something I think about more and more as my son’s due date approaches. I hope he’s brilliant and creative. But most of all I hope he’s happy and fulfilled. I wrestle with what happens if he decides that frying potatoes is his highest ambition and he gets really good at it, but I also think I’d envy some of that inward looking satisfaction.

I’m going to go eat some strawberries from my back yard now (Barber sank in a little), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on genius below.

Clarice Lispector and A Breath of Life into Characters

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The act of writing is one of expression as much as it is an act of creation. An author finds something within him- or herself that feels worthy of saying or investigating and then spends hours, months, years delving into and perfecting that expression. At the end readers like to think we see the author in the finished work, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell what’s polish and what’s raw glimpses of the author. With A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, the mystery of author remains, but even as we ponder who she was and what of her remains in the work, she gives us a surface story to contemplate.

In fact the entire book is a meditation on authorship and what it means to create and we readers watch Author (a male character) struggle to give life to (and to control and also to free) his character, Angela. It is a struggle that will be familiar to anyone who has ever created a character and this story reveals more about why and how we create than any plot about a writer ever could.

Battle Between Author and Character

“I had a vivid and inexplicable dream: I dreamed I was playing with my reflection. But my reflection wasn’t in a mirror, but reflected somebody else who wasn’t me.” – Clarice Lispector

Are our characters part of ourselves? Are the opposites we explore through writing because we cannot, will not live their way in life? Or are they some hybrid on which we work out those inner struggles? The answer is probably different for all writers, but I’d imagine that it includes some measure of all three.

In A Breath of Life, Author writes of his character Angela, “I got along well with her. But she started to disturb me and I saw that once again I’d have to take on the role of writer in order to put Angela into words because only then can I communicate with her.” This implies some sort of externalization of self whether it’s the actual self or the desired self. But later he writes, “It’s no use asking her to avoid recklessness since she was born to be exposed and go through every kind of experience.”

It’s fascinating to watch Author struggle with his relationship with Angela as it evolves. He knows she is a part of him: “I’ve been wanting to write about a person I invented: a woman named Angela Pralini. And it’s difficult. How to separate her from me? How do I make her different from what I am?.” But at times he cannot stand her: “I’ve discovered why I breathed life into Angela’s flesh, it was to have someone to hate. I hate her. She represents my terrible faith that is reborn every single morning.”

What’s truly brilliant about this relationship is the moment that Angela takes control from Author. He’s declared early on that she cannot write and that he abhors her style, but still she grows stronger than he does: “I don’t know what the climax of this book will be. But, as Angela goes on writing, I’ll recognize it.” And eventually (at least for a few moments), he cedes to her completely: “I realize with surprise but resignation that Angela is controlling me. She even writes better than I do. Now our ways of speaking are intersecting and getting confused.”

My Battle with Characterization

I don’t know how familiar this push-pull between writer and character is to other writers, but for me it brought back so many memories of writing Magda in Polska, 1994. A young girl of my age but a different nationality than me, the only year we experienced of her life is one that I too experienced in Poland. I remember poring over my diaries from that year for pertinent historical details to include, and at times some of my own angst and experience slipped in. But there were times, too, that Magda surprised me—even shocked me with things I would never dare say. As I wrote, she became her own person. And though I still tried to control her at times, she would not let me and I learned from her.

Writing: Raising Ourselves or Parenting?

“I am alone in the world. Angela is my only companion. You must understand me: I had to invent a being that was entirely mine. But it so happens that she’s becoming too powerful.”

I’m thinking a lot about creation of character these days, but from a completely different angle. I’m trying to imagine who this fetus growing in my womb will become. My husband and I are dreaming of activities and names for him, and we’re trying to maintain a space around him too to see who he will want to be.

Still, I imagine some of the struggle with raising a child will be some of the same struggle I had with Magda. As creator (and adult), I think I know best, but I will have to remain open to letting this little guy determine who he is and how he sees the world. I will have to resist telling him how it is because that closes him and me off to the opportunity of me learning from him. And I will have to restrain myself from putting my baggage onto him because he’ll have his own struggles and his own life and it’s up to me to work out mine in my own space.

I imagine this teeter-totter of shaping a child and allowing him to become is something I’ll struggle with for the rest of my life, but I’m glad I’ve had this perspective of the wonder of seeing a character become herself to look back on and remember the joy that can happen when I loosen my control.

The Act of Writing

“Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.” – Clarice Lispector

In many ways A Breath of Life is about the act of writing more than it is a story. Lispector was dying as she wrote it (and in fact died before it was finished) so we’ll never know if the book was truly meant to be seen in this form. But I love the rawness of the struggle Author goes through both with Angela and with himself. Like most of us, he sometimes hates writing. He’s digging inside of it to see why he even does this to himself. And yet he doesn’t stop.

Moments in the “dialogue” between Author and Angela end up feeling like character sketches rather than exposition:

“I’m not—I hope—judging myself with excessive impartiality. But I need to be a bit impartial or else I succumb and get tangled in my pathetic form of living. Besides physically there’s something rather pathetic about me: my big eyes are childishly interrogative at the same that they seem to ask for something and my lips are always half-open like when you’re surprised.”

And it’s easy to wonder if Lispector would have gone back and rewritten Angela once she had worked through this kind of information on the page. I would have. Most people would have. But I’m very glad she didn’t, because I really enjoyed seeing her process, even if I cannot know the sequence of it. Because of that rawness, this is not a book I’d recommend to most people, but if you’re a lonely writer toiling away in your garret and wondering how others do, it’s a great book. You may see yourself in it, you may not, but it will make you think more deeply about your craft and about the act of writing.

The Importance of Fiction

It’s been easy to assume throughout this pregnancy that I feel wonky because of hormones and this totally new experience that’s changing my relationships and my whole life. But I realized the other day that I’d given up an essential part of myself along the way. I stopped reading fiction that challenged me. I was reading through discards on my to-read shelf that were only okay and I spent more hours reading nonfiction about labor and delivery than I’ll ever spend in labor, but I wasn’t reading Lispector and Calvino and Pamuk (or any of the other favorites old and new). And I didn’t see, until they were missing from my life, how much books like that help me process the world.

We’ve probably all seen the articles on the internet about how reading fiction helps us empathize. It wasn’t until two friends posted an article about 11 novels expectant parents should read instead of parenting books that I understood how much I need space to process. I don’t need a parenting book to tell me that my baby will try and communicate with me to tell me he’s hungry. I need to see an illustration of the relationship that happens when a child’s needs aren’t met. I will not remember any of the words I read about breathing or birthing positions, but reading Edan Lepucki’s California profoundly affected my idea of what birth means.

So I’m back on the fiction. I don’t know if that will mean I’m blogging more frequently (I hope so, I miss communicating with you in this way), but it will mean a return to a semblance of balance in my life. At least in the mental sense, carrying around this big belly is doing nothing for my ability to stand upright 🙂

Thanks for reading. If you have a moment, I’d love to hear your thoughts on controlling characters and letting them go (whether the characters are on paper or in your home).

If you want to commune with Lispector by reading A Breath of Life, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Against Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

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I want to write about this gorgeous little book I read and how it made me ponder questions like ,”What if your entire life could be gathered into one work of art?” I want to consider how memoirists rarely stop at one book, poets and fiction writers scatter bits of themselves throughout their entire oeuvre, and visual artists capture one image or scene at a time. I want to think about how literary critics and art historians piece the clues together, but the story of an artist’s life is rarely whole. But as I was reading In The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by , all I could think about was Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.

Two very different books that both revolve around a single painting. In The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, that painting is a four-kilometer artwork painted over the course of Salvatierra’s lifetime which has been kept in a shed. In Bluebeard, that painting is a secret work that is kept hidden in a barn until the very end. Both painters, Juan Salvatierra and Rabo Karabekian, are outsider artists (although Karabekian is a museum guard and is in constant contact with the New York art scene). And while Salvatierra has casually tried to exhibit his work, Karabekian keeps his completely secret.

The Legacy of Bluebeard

So what was it that made these two books meld in my mind? For one, Bluebeard is one of those books that has stuck with me strongly in the decade since I read it. Not all parts of the book, in fact I’m sure to get a fact or two about the book wrong here, but the reveal of the painting. I think because I read the book when I was realizing that visual art was never going to be my forte and I was rediscovering how much I love writing. And then there’s the strength of the reveal. If you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here and skip ahead to the next section.

Karabekian’s barn contains a large scale canvas that portrays what he saw on the day that World War II ended. The way Vonnegut unfurls that information, the perfect mix of visual information and letting my imagination fill it in. For years after I read the book, I’d scan gallery exhibits and find paintings that I thought were like Karabekian’s work. I was obsessed. Eventually I relegated the book to the annals of my brain, but something about the opening page of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra where Salvatierra’s son, Miguel, is sitting in an exhibit in Europe watching a replica of his father’s painting slowly pass by brought the memories back.

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

None of that is to say that this book cannot stand on its own. If I had never read Bluebeard, I would have loved the opening of this book. I would have loved the spacious way that Mairal allows the reader to transition from chapter to chapter. Each chapter is so short and yet so complete as you follow the story of Miguel’s search for the one missing canvas that represents one year in his father’s life.

Mairal beautifully balances exposition about Juan Salvatierra’s life (he became mute as a child and this painting became one of the primary ways he expressed himself), the visual details of the painting, and Miguel’s search. Although I was relatively certain from the beginning that all the rolls of canvas would eventually be reunited, and I was not surprised at why that canvas had gone missing, I was so immersed in the family’s story that I couldn’t put the book down.

Some novellas achieve that perfect amount of engagement and openness that allow them to feel bigger and more complete than the longest saga. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is one of those novellas. It is the story of the search for the one roll of canvas that’s missing after Salvatierra’s death. It’s the story of two sons unfurling and understanding their father’s life and lifework. And it’s the story of how everything we do in our lives really does add up to one whole. I hope you’ll love it as much as I did.

I have no way of knowing if Mairal ever read Bluebeard and it’s possible that the connection exists only in my mind, but when I say that The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra brought me back in mind to Bluebeard time and time again, I mean it as the highest compliment.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.