biography
| name: |
Martín-Santos, Luis
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pronunciation:
[mah(r)teen santos
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1924–64)
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| biography:
| Novelist, born in Larache, N Morocco. He was director of the Psychiatric Sanatorium in San Sebastián, Spain, until his death in a car accident. In addition to professional studies, Dilthey, Jaspers y la comprensión del enfermo mental (1955) and Libertad, temporalidad y transferencia en la psicoanálisis existencial (1964), he wrote important short stories and fragments, some collected by Salvador Clotas in the posthumous Apólogos (1970), and two major novels, the second remaining unfinished. Tiempo de silencio (1962) is a novel set in the Madrid of 1949. Introducing into Spanish the linguistic complexity of James Joyce's Ulysses, he borrows Joyce's tragic-burlesque milieu also from the Sueños of Quevedo and from La Celestina. A work of strong negative social criticism, Tiempo de silencio also offers a subjective, poetic, and innovatory approach to the novel at odds with the pedestrian social realism then prevalent in Spain, and has been very influential. A stylistic tour de force, it has been translated into English and several other languages. Tiempo de destrucción (1975) is a careful, scholarly attempt by José-Carlos Mainer to gather the fragments of a project on which Martín-Santos was working when he died. In this work, it appears that the protagonist may achieve his transformation by a careful understanding of his own predicament and that of his Basque society; but it is too fragmented, and the novelist's intention too obscure, for any real conclusion to be drawn as to its importance to a generation which had already profited by the aesthetic liberation of Tiempo de silencio. |
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