by Luis Martín-Santos

Luis Martín-Santos, son of a military officer, was born in Larache, Morocco, in 1924, and raised in San Sebastian, in the Spanish Basque country, where he resided most of his life. He was both a practicing psychiatrist and a writer of two books, as well as articles on psychiatry, a book of essays and short stories, and two novels, Time of Silence and the incomplete Time of Destruction (Tiempo de destrucción, 1975). Also politically active, Martín-Santos was jailed several times for his participation in the banned Spanish Socialist Party. Circumstances prevented him from enjoying the acclaim of Time of Silence for very long; in 1964, two years after its release, he died in an automobile accident. A searing indictment of Francoist society, Time of Silence also marks a turning point in the development of contemporary Spanish prose. The novel dramatically...