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Time of Silence

Time of Silence

by Luis Martín-Santos, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush

$16.95
$16.95
Available as E-Book Fiction Spanish Literature
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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230038
Pages: 248
Publication Date:

Praise

....Martín-Santos’s novel represented a breath of fresh air, of modernity, with its experimental games and its stubborn work to create a language of its own, totally different from the one that was in use.
—Mario Vargas Llosa, letter to José Lázaro, 2005

Time of Silence surprised all the critics and writers with their trousers down. All of them, at that time, considered this novel to be the book they themselves would have liked to have written. Some went further in their praise and managed to write Time of Silence in a different way. This is called a belated but necessary homage: the author was dead, but his book, one of the most influential in modern Spain, lived on. It lives on, despite the passage of time and people.
—Guillermo Cabrera Infante

A novel that is on the same level as any book by Cortázar or any of the sacred monsters [of the Boom]. —Juan García Hortelano

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