Time of Silence

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 at his boardinghouse are depicted here with anything but the social realism one might expect of a mid-twentieth century Spanish novel. Instead, Luis Martín-Santos presents us with an altogether innovative stream of consciousness, unfurling a lyrical yet jaundiced tableau of a society hitting rock bottom after years of authoritarian rule. Published in 1962, Time of Silence is a masterpiece of modern Spanish fiction. Its vision of depressed individuals struggling to survive makes 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 a picture of a world beyond hope, redeemed solely by genial self-mockery. Peter Bush's new translation gloriously restores all that was previously axed by Spanish censors.

Luis Martín-Santos (1924-1964) was an innovative anti-realist writer as well as an eminent neuropsychiatrist and anti-Franco militant. After graduating with a degree in medicine from Salamanca University, he moved to Madrid in 1947, where he specialized in psychiatry and became involved in the city's literary culture. In 1952 he was appointed the director of San Sebastián's psychiatric hospital, and a year later he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis, "Dilthey, Jaspers, and the Understanding of the Mentally Ill." He joined the clandestine PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) in 1957, becoming a member of its executive committee in 1958, an affiliation that led to his imprisonment in 1958, 1959, and 1962. Time of Silence was published in a heavily censored form in 1962 and was an immediate success. At the time of his death following a car accident in January 1964, Martín-Santos left behind a large body of unpublished stories, plays, and novels, including the unfinished sequel to Time of Silence, Time of Destruction (published posthumously in 1977). His short-story collaboration with Juan Benet, El amanecer podrido (The Putrefied Dawn), was published in 2020, and in 2024 the Spanish publisher Galaxia Gutenberg embarked on the publication of his Complete Works. Peter Bush has translated, among other books, Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook, which was awarded the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation; Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tyrant Banderas; and Joan Sales's linked novels, Uncertain Glory and Winds of the Night (all available as NYRB Classics). He lives in Bristol, England.