Luis Martín­ Santos - 'The bravura and lyricism of the prose, the casual deftness of the symbols, and most of all the brilliant concluding monologue leave no doubt that the author was not content with a realistic novel

         
Luis Martín-Santos, Time of Silence, Trans. by George Lee­son,
Columbia University Press, 1989. [1962.]


An enveloping haze of dedicated rationalism fails to save a young scientist from the less lofty, but much more real, ways of the world. Don Pedro, not yet a doctor and far from a man, dreams of finding a cure for cancer in his tumorous mice imported from Illinois. The madrileno world has other dreams: his shantytown assistant concentrates on possible profits in the illicit mice trade, his lower-class landlady prepares a match with her granddaughter, and his intellectual friend Matias dreams of very little, but his presence completes the socio-economic roster. The incongruity of the different social strata forms the novel's superstructure, preparing Pedro's downfall in a collusion of circumstance and his own weakness. In his scientific fervor he performs an illegal abortion in shantytown, which--in a somewhat breathless, chain reaction--kills the girl whose would-be lover then murders Pedro's fiancee. He loses his job and with it every shred of social and professional respectability. If this rather familiar plot succeeds in being tragic, then the tragedy lies in Pedro's thinking too much, a flaw that carries over into the heavy intellectualism of the writing. The narrational leaps from boarding house to shanty to intellectual cafÉ do not quite succeed in keeping Pedro's rational voice from labored intrusion when it ought to be silent. Madrid speaks, however, in its most ambitious and ambivalent tongue, imparting a degree of power to the novel. More interesting than arresting, it is at least a welcome break in the silence of translations from contemporary Spain. - Kirkus Reviews


A PEDANT who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, 'Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing? And the sage answered him. Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.“

The quotation is from Miguel de Unamuno's “Tragic Sense of Life,” and if, as Unamuno goes on to say, whole peoples may possess this sense, the Spanish are certainly among them. One should say, still among them—since Unamuno argues that the basis of this tragic sense of life is a radical opposition between knowing and living, and that opposition may in the course of time be resolved at the expense of one or the other. Luis Martin‐Santos's “Time of Silence” is one of the most recent evidences that the Spanish still possess the tragic sense. (The fact that the novel was published in Spain only after much cutting is evidence that their censors have neither common nor esthetic sense.)

Pedro, the hero, is a young doctor doing cancer research in Madrid. When the last of his cancerous mice, imported from Illinois, dies, he visits a shanty slum on the outskirts of Madrid—where, he is told, mice stolen from the laboratory after failing to thrive there, have been coaxed into multiplying between the breasts of their keeper's young daughters. Thus begins a story—told at great speed mainly and through Pedro—that involves the young doctor in an illegal abortion, flight from the police, arrest, dismissal of charges followed by dis‐ missal from the Institute and the murder of his fiancé. Despite the rapidity of the action, the author sketches in certain segments of contemporary Madrid in memorable detail: A shabby‐genteel boarding house; a slum on the outskirts of the city; a dilettantish cocktail party; a student's Saturday night spree, ending in a brothel.

Yet the bravura and lyricism of the prose (for which translator George Leeson is also to be thanked), the casual deftness of the symbols and most of all the brilliant concluding monologue leave no doubt that the author was not content with a realistic novel. It seems clear that Pedro (who has no last name that I can find in the text) is Spain itself, or the virility of Spain. He is “the lost man, the man whom they prevented from doing what he was called to do.” He recalls that the Turks used to castrate their slaves on the beaches of Anatolia and that sailors in passing ships, many miles away, could hear the cries of pain and of lamentation at the loss of virility. He, however, lives in the time of silence when it is comfortable and peaceful to be a eunuch, and most of all a spiritual eunuch, one who merely lives.

THE existence of this book, and its quality, belie its title, for Martin‐Santos spoke out. Solon's reply to the pedant has a double relevance here. Not only could the Pedro of the book cry out because it did not avail; but those of us who read this novel may do the same. Luis Martin‐Santos was killed in a car accident last January at the age of 39. A surgeon and a psychiatrist, he had also published essays on Dilthey and Jaspers. This is his first and last novel; the ironic appropriateness of the title—it is the same in the Spanish—needs no emphasis. - www.nytimes.com/1964/11/29/archives/man-lost-in-madrid-time-of-silence-by-luis-martinsantos-translated.html

I just happened upon this book in a charity shop in the first week of July, so I bought it and read it for Spanish Literature Month. I thought I might vaguely have heard of it before somewhere.
Despite the occasional savage review, I do usually start books optimistically; – and normally this continues for a few pages at least, before the poverty of thought and style start to bore me. Perhaps because I’ve struggled with so many books recently (including other ones for SLM) and really can only any longer find myself persevering with works of the very highest standard, I began Time of Silence with a fair degree of disinclination and prejudice; and nothing in the first part dissuaded me from this. Something about experiments on mice and cancer; scientific jargon; short sentences – little to impress.
At some point though, which in retrospect I imagined was much further on, at the point when our hero Pedro and his assistant Amador descend into the shantytown in the Madrid suburbs, but which may in truth have been much earlier, my mind changed and I began to think that this novel, written by a man unknown in the country (at least, he has no English Wikipedia page) was the best novel I’d read this year (which isn’t saying too much, since I haven’t read too much) and moreover one of the better ones of the last century.
Perhaps it was sentences like this description of Madrid on p.11:

The city is so stunted, so lacking in historical substance, treated in such an offhand way by arbitrary rulers, capriciously built in a desert, inhabited by so few families rooted in its past, far from the sea or any river, ostentatious in the display of its shabby poverty, favored by a splendid sky which almost makes one forget its defects, ingenuously self-satisfied like a fifteen–year-old girl, created merely for the prestige of a dynasty, … bereft of authentic nobility … incapable of speaking its own language with the correct intonation … having no authentic Jewry … rich in dull theologians and poor in splendid mystics … [and so on for a page or two]

From then on, I found the writing marvellous, and it began to fulfil for me the one value of any worth in literature: that is, every time I remembered it, I wanted to pick it up again and continue reading. Martín-Santos certainly has a way of approaching narrative I find at almost every moment pleasing, though I’d have to pay a good deal more attention to being a critic than a reader to decide precisely what this is.
Since this meant to be a learned review, however, aspiring to claim more than just “it was great”, let me make a few easy comparisons: I thought at first it was like Joyce’s Ulysses, it had shifting view-points and stream-of-consciousness bits and seemed to be taking course over a single day and there was a nighttown scene where our hero visited a brothel; but then I began to think it was a bit more like Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, for it was more wide-ranging than Joyce, there were intimations of a plot developing, people were involved in sin, satire abounded and the sentences wandered where they liked; but then I settled on it being more like Bely’s Petersberg, because there were many capricious changes of style, and a sort of thriller plot was developing. Yes, it is like all these things; and it also reminded me of Juan Goytisolo too, those rants of his against Spain and the Spanish, though here it is more controlled, more considered and intelligible.
Read it then, if you can find a copy.
(This was Martín-Santos’ only novel. He was soon after killed in a car-crash.) - obooki.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/time-of-silence-by-luis-martin-santos/


A grandson of Spaniards who hailed from somewhere between Colmenar de Oreja and Villamanrique del Tajo and for that reasons spoke glowingly of the land they left behind, the master had pictured Madrid otherwise. To him, raised amidst the opulence of Mexican silver and red lava stone, the city appeared drab, gloomy, and mean. Except for the main square, all was narrow, dirty and squalid when one considered how broad and richly ornamented the streets at home were, with their tiled façades, balconies aloft on the wings of cherubs between cornucopias pouring forth fruits carved out of stone, and signboards the very models of fine painting whose lettering entwined with vine leaves and ivy proclaimed the attractions of jewelry shops. The inns here were poor, with a smell of rancid oil that seeped into the rooms, and it was impossible in many of those hostelries to sleep as one would like because of the din set up by street players—bawling the verses of loas or bellowing at Roman emperors, changing from togas fashioned of bed sheets and curtains to costumes of buffoons and Basques—whose entremeses had musical accompaniments which, although enormously entertaining to the young black for their novelty, quit irritated the master because they were so out of tune. As for the cuisine, the less said the better. The sight of the meatballs they were served and the monotonous hakes called up remembrance in the Mexican of the subtlety of red snapper and the pomp of turkey swathed in dark-hued sauces rich with the aroma of chocolate and the fires of a thousand spices; the quotidian cabbage, insipid beans, chick-peas, and broccoli moved the black to sing the praises of the full-throated, tender avocado, of malanga tubers which, sprinkled with vinegar, parsley, and garlic, appeared on the tables of his country in the company of crabs, the tawny meat of whose claws was more substantial than the beefsteaks of this land. - Nathan Friedman
https://nathanfriedmanmusic.wordpress.com/2018/06/