Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos
Published 1962 · 248 pages · 85,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction
How hard is Time of Silence to read?
Time of Silence scores 82 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 84 out of 100
- Medical and scientific terminology, philosophical vocabulary from Heidegger and Freud, Madrid slang and deliberate archaism, all colliding inside single paragraphs.
- Sentence structure: 86 out of 100
- Enormous periodic sentences, unmarked shifts between third person, second person and interior monologue, and stretches of unpunctuated stream of consciousness.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- The narrative is constantly interrupted by essayistic digressions on science, Spanish history, Cervantes, Goya and the metaphysics of failure.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Scientific method, Madrid's class geography from shantytown to boarding house to brothel, and a running commentary on Spanish intellectual history, packed into a short novel.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Voices are unattributed, the narrator adopts and drops characters' minds without warning, and key events are reported at a slant or after the fact.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- The imported mice bred against human skin, the unfinished cathedral of Spanish science, and Goya's black paintings serve as a sustained figure for a country's arrested development.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- The mock-heroic register applied to squalor, and the narrator's grand apostrophes to a city that has defeated everyone in the book, keep every sentence at an angle to its content.
- Resolution withholding: 84 out of 100
- Pedro is exonerated, ruined, married off and exiled to the provinces, and the closing monologue explicitly refuses to make any of it mean something.
- Structural complexity: 84 out of 100
- Sixty-three untitled sections shifting narrator, register and level without transition, from clinical report to interior monologue to essay.
How Time of Silence is regarded
Time of Silence holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.