Novel
Time of Silence
Tiempo de silencio
Luis Martín-Santos · 1962
Synopsis
Madrid, in the autumn of 1949. Pedro, a young doctor, carries out cancer research in the laboratory with a strain of mice from the United States, which die faster than they reproduce. His assistant, Amador, had given a few of them to a relative, the Muecas, who breeds them in his shack on the outskirts with his daughters; Pedro goes to buy them from him. From there he descends into the city's underworld, among the boarding house where the landladies would like to marry him off, the brothels and the literary café, until the day the Muecas comes to fetch him because he is a doctor.
Context
Completed in 1960, the manuscript was submitted to the Pío Baroja prize under the title Tiempo frustrado and under a pseudonym; the jury did not award the prize. The book appeared from Seix Barral cut by the censors of some twenty pages, mostly brothel scenes; a second edition, after the author's death, restored part of them, and the so-called definitive edition sought to restore everything, but as the original typescript was lost, none gives the first text. Interior monologue, the second person and free indirect style bring Joyce into the Spanish novel.
Who it is for
A learned and ironic prose, broken up by digressions; the poor Madrid of 1949 and the censorship of the time shed light on the book.
Prizes and reception
Selected by El Mundo among the hundred best novels in Spanish of the century; Vicente Aranda brought it to the screen in 1986.