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 scientist with Nobel ambitions. His dallying with literary and philosophical coteries, his hunt for the right strain of experimental mice in Madrid’s slums, and the table talk in his boarding-house where his landlady wants to engineer marriage with her granddaughter aren’t the stuff of social realism, but of an original stream of consciousness, a series of lyrical, meditative, playful and jaundiced tableaux of a society that has hit rock-bottom after years of an authoritarian rule that is but the latest in a series of disasters in the decline of a nation. Published in 1962, Luis Martín-Santos’s novel is a masterpiece of contemporary Spanish fiction, and its linguistic inventiveness and imaginative encompass of depressed individuals struggling to survive make it a fictional fleur du mal for our times. Martín-Santos draws on the black humor of Goya and the wit of Joyce to create the vision of a world beyond hope redeemed solely by genial self-mockery. This new translation restores all that was axed by the censors.
