Time of Silence

”….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 thattime, considered this novel to be the book they themselves would have liked to have written. Somewent 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“[A] fine translation of a complex book, rich in vocabulary, irony, slang and sharp shifts in tone.” —Michael Eaude, Literary Review (UK)

Luis Martin-Santos (1924-1964) was an innovative anti-realist writer as well as an eminent neuropsychiatrist and anti-Franco militant. After graduating with a degree in medicine from Salamanca University, he moved to Madrid in 1947, where he specialized in psychiatry and became involved in the city’s literary culture. In 1952 he was appointed the director of San Sebastian’s psychiatric hospital, and a year later he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis, “Dilthey, Jaspers, and the Understanding of the Mentally Ill.” He joined the clandestine PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in 1957, becoming a member of its executive committee in 1958, an affiliation that led to his imprisonment in 1958, 1959, and 1962. Time of Silence was published in a heavily censored form in 1962 and was an immediate success. At the time of his death following a car accident in January 1964, Martin-Santos left behind a large body of unpublished stories, plays, and novels, including the unfinished sequel to Time of Silence, Time of Destruction (published posthumously in 1977). His short-story collaboration with Juan Benet, El amanecer podrido (The Putrefied Dawn), was published in 2020, and in 2024 the Spanish publisher Galaxia Gutenberg embarked on the publication of his Complete Works.

Peter Bush has translated, among other books, Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, which was awarded the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation; Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tyrant Banderas; and Joan Sales’s linked novels, Uncertain Glory and Winds of the Night. He lives in Bristol, England.