Time of Silence was first published in 1962, during the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. The author Luis Martín-Santos was an eminent psychiatrist. A leading member of the illegal Socialist Party, he was imprisoned three times in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was killed in a car accident in January 1964, aged thirty-nine. This is his only completed novel. Jorge Semprún wrote in the late 1940s that it was impossible to write good literature within Franco’s Spain, as the dictatorship crushed all creativity. History has shown Semprún was wrong: fine novels were written during the years of oppression. Indeed, the stifling atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s stimulated the resourcefulness of writers such as Martín-Santos. Time of Silence had twenty pages deleted by the censors, but surprisingly its publication was permitted. It was restored to full glory only after the coming of democracy. This fine translation of a complex book, rich in vocabulary, irony, slang and sharp shifts in tone, is based on the uncensored text.

The novel’s plot is simple and brutal. The main character, Pedro, is a young scientist engaged in cancer research in 1949. In bleak, impoverished Madrid, proper research is impossible. Pedro’s imported lab mice die. To find more, he and his assistant Amador visit a shanty town, where a man called Snarler has been breeding them. Later, a panic-stricken Snarler wakes Pedro in the seedy boarding house where he lives in the middle of the night. He has carried out an abortion on his daughter, Florita, who is bleeding heavily. Pedro tries to save her, but she dies. Pedro is arrested, but is then released thanks to the evidence of Florita’s mother. The arrest causes him to lose his job.

A parallel plot involves Pedro’s boarding house. The ‘war hero’s widow’ who runs it is trying to ensnare Pedro into marrying her granddaughter Dorita by luring him into bed with her. Although he sees through the procuress’s wiles, Pedro passively succumbs to Dorita’s charms. The two plots converge when Florita’s