Time of Silence - by Luis Martín-Santos (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A young cancer researcher ventures through the streets, slums, and subcultures of Francoist Madrid in this widely roving, linguistically inventive novel--a sort of Spanish Ulysses, but infused with the grotesquerie and dark comedy of Goya--available here in a new translation and with previously censored material restored.

This novel of abortion and murder set in the squalor of the first decade of General Franco's dictatorship follows a few days in the life of Don Pedro, a cancer research scientist with Nobel ambitions. His dallying with literary and philosophical coteries, his hunt for the right strain of experimental mice in Madrid's slums, and the table talk in his boarding-house where his landlady wants to engineer marriage with her granddaughter aren't the stuff of social realism, but of an original stream of consciousness, a series of lyrical, meditative, playful and jaundiced tableaux of a society that has hit rock-bottom after years of an authoritarian rule that is but the latest in a series of disasters in the decline of a nation.

Published in 1962, Luis Martín-Santos's novel is a masterpiece of contemporary Spanish fiction, and its linguistic inventiveness and imaginative encompass of depressed individuals struggling to survive make it a fictional fleur du mal for our times. Martín-Santos draws on the black humor of Goya and the wit of Joyce to create the vision of a world beyond hope redeemed solely by genial self-mockery. This new translation restores all that was axed by the censors.

Review Quotes

"....Martín-Santos's novel represented a breath of fresh air, of modernity, with its experimental games and its stubborn work to create a language of its own, totally different from the one that was in use." --Mario Vargas Llosa, letter to José Lázaro, 2005

"Time of Silence surprised all the critics and writers with their trousers down. All of them, at that
time, considered this novel to be the book they themselves would have liked to have written. Some
went further in their praise and managed to write Time of Silence in a different way. This is called a belated but necessary homage: the author was dead, but his book, one of the most influential in modern Spain, lived on. It lives on, despite the passage of time and people." --Guillermo Cabrera Infante

"A novel that is on the same level as any book by Cortázar or any of the sacred monsters [of the Boom]." --Juan García Hortelano

About the Author

Luis Martín-Santos (1924-1964) was a Moroccan-born Spanish writer and psychiatrist, best known for his novel Time of Silence.

Peter Bush is an award-winning translator of Catalan, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. His translations include Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook, which won the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, Joan Sales's Uncertain Glory and Winds of the Night, and Honoré de Balzac's The Lily in the Valley.