Time of Silence (1961) is a novel by the Spanish physician and psychiatrist Luis Martín-Santos that above all reflects the existential void (the absence of God) experienced by its protagonist, Pedro, a doctor who begins his career as a researcher and fails. I think there are quite a few autobiographical traces and features in the protagonist. The atmosphere portrayed in the novel is sordid and hypersexualized.
Pedro lives in a shabby boarding house whose landlady, as the narrator recounts, had been repeatedly deceived by her husband, a soldier in the Philippine campaign. These infidelities are narrated in a coarse manner, though without explicit sexual references, rather indirectly. As the soldier returns crippled from the Spanish–American War, the narrator suggests that his wife experiences sexual dissatisfaction. When she becomes a widow, she opens a boarding house and makes use of her femininity, and later that of her daughter and granddaughter, to attract new tenants.
Pedro, who has barely practiced medicine, while drunk and after having been in a brothel, attempts to save the pregnant daughter of his rat-catcher (the man who supplies and looks after the rats for his laboratory) from a severe hemorrhage caused by an induced abortion, but he fails and the girl bleeds to death. Pedro becomes afraid and hides for several days in the same brothel until he is reported. The narrator describes in detail the characteristics of the brothel, several prostitutes, and the history of the brothel’s owner. The entire novel reflects this nihilistic vision. In the end, Pedro is expelled from his research center and leaves Madrid.
This novel has been greatly praised and it has been said that it represents a turning point in Spanish realist narrative. Without denying this, perhaps the novel’s quality has been somewhat exaggerated because its author died prematurely and because he was an anti-Franco activist who was imprisoned several times for that reason. Nevertheless, the reader also experiences a sense of emptiness upon finishing the novel, since it says nothing to him, not even a single word of hope. In general, critics have attributed this emptiness, this nihilism, to the author’s desire to express the lack of scientific research and the absence of freedom under the regime of General Francisco Franco. However, one is struck by the brothel-like atmosphere that the author seems to know well and that permeates almost the entire novel. It is clear that the novel shows Sartrean influences (existential nihilism). I think it may be of interest only to specialists in Spanish literature of those years.