Luis Martín-Santos’s “Time of Silence”: A Manic Narration of Cultural Stagnation https://ift.tt/086PtHb
Luis Martín-Santos was a psychiatrist and dissident intellectual in Spain under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Time of Silence, which was originally published spanish in 1962 when he was 38, was the only book to appear in his lifetime; he was killed in a car crash just two years later. It made a splash in Spain when it was published, and it’s not hard to see why: Martín-Santos’s opinionated, manic narration, full of insider references (there’s a scene set at his favorite café and an extended put-down of José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher and essayist), sex, and social observation, makes for just the kind of book that literary people love to talk about.
Martín-Santos lived in San Sebastian for most of his life, but the book is self-consciously a novel about Madrid. Readers familiar with the Spanish capital as tourists, for whom it’s an elegant, welcoming city filled with good restaurants, or from Almodóvar movies, where it’s a colorful backdrop for all sorts of erotic hijinks, will hardly recognize it as it appears in Time of Silence. Martín-Santos’s Madrid is run-down, inward-turning, and cut off from the world, its inhabitants glum, weary, and still weighed down with guilt and fear from the civil war. The novel’s main character is a young doctor and cancer researcher identified only as Don Pedro, who, over the course of a few days, ventures far from home and gets himself into a number of scrapes. From Pedro’s lab, where he meditates on tumors in mice and dreams of the Nobel prize, the story follows him out all over the city: its slums, its literary cafés, his dismal boarding house, the elegant apartment of his well-born friend, and many other locations high and low, including jail and the morgue.
Although the city’s residents may be downcast, Martín-Santos’s style is confident and gregarious. He takes on the voices of policemen and prostitutes, rich playboys and petty criminals, as well as the rather nebbishy hero, indulging in flights of philosophizing and sometimes dipping into stream-of-consciousness style. Time of Silence is obviously aiming to be a kind of Iberian Ulysses (there’s even a long, lyrical brothel scene). While the ambition is impressive, Martín-Santos does not have Joyce’s poetic gift, and his verbal flourishes and digressions often come off as excessively wordy and end up slowing the story down. Joycean virtuosity is especially difficult to pull off in translation, and though Peter Bush does a fine job in general, the piquant slang of Madrid’s 1960s slums is difficult to render in contemporary English, and certain anachronisms (“ginormous,” “at the top of her game,” etc.) can’t help but be jarring.
When Martín-Santos eases off the high style, though, the book is enjoyable. There’s plenty of action and a lively cast of characters, and the story, which ranges over every level of society, is engaging. Martín-Santos was obviously a keen observer and appreciator of his countrymen and his city, and it’s a pleasure to travel high and low with him through midcentury Madrid. When Pedro is briefly thrown in jail and released, terrified and humiliated, he’s shown out by a “smiling policeman with goldgreen eyes,” who tells him cheerfully, “You intellectuals are always the dumbest. I can never understand why it’s always you people, cultured, well-educated folk, who mess up the most. A garden-variety pickpocket, a poor critter, an idiot, the pettiest of petty thieves defends himself better than you do.” At Pedro’s wealthy friend’s apartment, “The lobby smelled of refined pine-ozone quite unlike the ersatz stuff used in local fleapits.” Pedro, riding the train out to the provinces, muses, resignedly, “Down here we crawl along and eventually make it to the place where we must stand and wait in silence for the years to pass and then go silently to the place where all the little flowers of this world go.”
In the end, Time of Silence succeeds in spite of, rather than because of, its high-modernist aspirations. The novel’s reach exceeds its grasp somewhat, but though it may not be the Great Spanish Novel it sets out to be, it’s a memorable portrait of its time. There’s something poignant about the contrast between its stylistic ambition and extraversion and the withdrawn city it depicts: it’s an energetic portrayal of a stagnating society.
FICTION Time of Silence
By Luis Martín-Santos
Translated by Peter Bush
NYRB Classics
Published July 29, 2025
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