Time Of Silence

Resumen del libro

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.

Biografía del autor

Nació en Larache (Marruecos) en 1924 y falleció en Vitoria en 1964. Cursó la carrera de Medicina en la Universidad de Salamanca y se doctoró por la de Madrid en 1947. Residente en San Sebastián desde 1929, en 1951 pasó a dirigir el sanatorio psiquiátrico de dicha ciudad. Su novela Tiempo de silencio (Seix Barral, 1962 y 2004) es una obra fundamental en la historia de la literatura española. Póstumamente fueron recogidos diversos textos suyos en el libro misceláneo Apólogos (Seix Barral, 1970), y apareció su inacabada novela Tiempo de destrucción (Seix Barral, 1975 y 1998). También es autor de los ensayos Dilthey, Jaspers y la compresión del enfermo mental (1955), Libertad, temporalidad y trasferencia en el psicoanálisis existencial (Seix Barral, 1964) y El análisis existencial. Escritos escogidos (2004), una selección de trabajos inéditos hasta hoy en forma de libro que recogen las bases filosóficas de su pensamiento.