Time of Silence

A young cancer researcher ventures through the streets, slums, and subcultures of Francoist Madrid in this widely roving, linguistically inventive novel—a sort of Spanish Ulysses, but infused with the grotesquerie and dark comedy of Goya—available here in a new translation and with previously censored material restored.

This novel of abortion and murder set in the squalor of the first decade of General Franco’s dictatorship follows a few days in the life of Don Pedro, a cancer research scien...