Time of Silence

Time of Silence (Tiempo de silencio) is a novel by the Spanish writer Luis Martín-Santos (1924-1964), published in 1961 by the Barcelona publisher Seix Barral. Earlier, under the title Tiempo frustrado and the pseudonym "Luis Sepúlveda", it had been entered in the first edition of the Premio Pío Baroja, without winning. It is the only complete novel by its author, who died in a traffic accident at the age of 39. He left unfinished another novel, Tiempo de destrucción, published in 1975, and several of his short pieces appeared in 1970 as Apólogos. The book is considered a landmark of twentieth-century Spanish fiction and a turning point that opened a period of renewal in the country's literature.

The plot is simple and linear, following the classic structure of beginning, middle and end. The critic Buckley summed it up as "the story of a man who wanted to be a scientific researcher and failed". Its protagonist, Pedro, is a young doctor studying cancer in a strain of mice brought from the United States, in Madrid in the late 1940s, where poverty makes it nearly impossible to continue the work. To obtain more animals he turns to Amador, his laboratory assistant, who gets them from a relative, El Muecas, a man living in a shantytown. That contact draws Pedro into the city's underworld and into a deadly drama: called to help Florita, El Muecas's daughter, who bleeds to death after an abortion performed at home, he cannot save her. Pursued by the police, he is freed when the girl's mother testifies that she was already dead when he arrived. Back at his boarding house, the family that runs it tries to match him with Dorita, toward whom he feels a lukewarm attraction. Cartucho, Florita's boyfriend, decides to avenge her and kills Dorita during a street festival. Pedro ends up losing his research post and becomes a country doctor.

The action moves through different corners of Madrid: brothels, literary cafés, bourgeois receptions, middle-class hardship and the shantytowns. Over this framework the author layers interior monologues, the narrator's digressions, cultural allusions and a constant irony that distorts the characters and serves to criticise the society and institutions of Francoist Spain, such as marriage and the family. Pedro is a passive anti-hero rather than an active one: he does not confront difficulties so much as get overwhelmed by them, and he arouses pity more than admiration. The female characters, often presented in fragments and through archetypes, reflect the limited role of women in the period.

The novel is not divided into chapters but into sixty-three sections separated by a blank space, with no numbering or titles, so the reader must work out in each one who is speaking and about what. Martín-Santos alternates interior monologue, clearly indebted to Joyce, perspectivism, which shows the same event from several viewpoints, and ironic, grotesque description. His complex, avant-garde style departs from the prevailing social realism and is the true centre of the work, conceived to renew a narrative still tied to nineteenth-century forms.