Luis Martin-Santos

Background

Martín-Santos was born in Larache, Morocco in 1924. Son of the military doctor Leandro Martín-Santos, at five years of age his family moved to San Sebastián, where he would ultimately spend most of his life.

Education

He studied medicine in Salamanca and received his doctorate in psychiatry in Madrid, where he developed friendships with specialists like doctors Juan José López Ibor, Pedro Laín Entralgo, and Carlos Castilla del Pino.

Career

At the same time, he became interested in literature and spent time at the Café Gijón, where he met many prominent writers of his generation like Ignacio Aldecoa, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, and Juan Benet. He also spent time with Alfonso Sastre. As a journalist, he published Tauromaquia (Bullfighting) and Noticia del coloquio sobre realismo y realidad en la literatura contemporánea (News from the Colloquy on Realism and Reality in Contemporary Literature).

As a poet, he wrote Grana Gris which was published in 1945.

His most important work was done as a narrator, an area in which he is considered to have initiated the technical revolution of the Spanish social novel during the sixties. In 1951 he became director of the psychiatric hospital of San Sebastián and subsequently reintegrated into the life San Sebastián.

He participated in the so-called "Academia Errante," a debate forum created by restless Spanish intellectuals in the sixties who were searching for new forms of expression. He labored in the then-clandestine Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party)) and was thrown into prison on three occasions.

Near the end of 1960 he finished writing the novel, which was published in 1962 with twenty censored pages.

An uncensored edition was not published until 1981. In this novel he makes innovative use of interior monologue, second person, indirect free style, stream of consciousness, desrealización, and mythification, narrative devices that had been pioneered earlier by James Joyce. He wrote (Time of Destruction), that was left incomplete when the author died in a traffic accident in Vitoria, Spain on 21 January 1964.

Nevertheless, it was published in 1975.

The same publisher also released a posthumous collection of his short stories, entitled Apólogos, in 1970. is also a movie based on the book and directed by Vicente Aranda.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Tiempo De Silencio (Spanish Edition)

    (Pedro es un joven medico que malvive en una pension de Ma...)

  • Tiempo de silencio (Biblioteca Breve) (Spanish Edition)

    (Pedro es un joven medico que malvive en una pension de Ma...)

  • Tiempo de silencio

    (Seix Barral. Barcelona. 1984. 21 cm. 293 p. Encuadernació...)

  • Tiempo de Silencio (Spanish Edition)

Politics

He became a member of the Executive Committee and became friends with the socialist leader Enrique Múgica Herzog.

Views

He read Jean-Paul Sartre extensively and became interested in existentialism.