Spanish · 1924–1964
Martín-Santos ran the psychiatric hospital in San Sebastián, wrote on Heidegger and psychoanalysis, and belonged to the clandestine socialist party, for which he was jailed three times. In 1962 he published Time of Silence, a novel that took the flat social realism then dominant in Spain and blew it open with Joycean syntax, mock-epic digression and a narrator who could move from a slum shack to a lecture on Cervantes in one paragraph. The censors cut twenty pages; the full text appeared only in 1981. It changed what a Spanish novel could do more decisively than any book since the Civil War. He was killed in a car crash near Vitoria in 1964, at thirty-nine, leaving a second novel unfinished on his desk.