Introduction

Ritmo lento was completed in 1962, and came second to Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero) in that year's Biblioteca Breve literary competition. Its publication by Seix Barral in 1963 coincided with the start of the Latin American boom, and followed the publication of Martín Santos's Tiempo de silencio. As a result, Ritmo lento made less of an impression than might otherwise have been expected. After Ritmo lento, Martín Gaite abandoned fiction for over a decade to concentrate on academic and other non-fiction works.

The novel was examined by the censors in 1963. Despite some confusion regarding characters (the censor comments on the protagonist stabbing his mother, rather than his father), and reference to ‘unas páginas un tanto macabras’ (some rather macabre pages), the censor concluded, bizarrely, that ‘la novela es aceptable, incluso serenadora’ (the novel is acceptable, even calming).

Ritmo lento represented a change in direction away from social realism for both Martín Gaite and the Spanish novel. Like Tiempo de silencio, it signalled a move away from the collective to psychological explorations of individual perspectives, and involved experimentation with narrative structure. Brown argues that ‘independently, yet contemporaneously, both these works inaugurated the new social novel in Spain.’ Martín Gaite herself acknowledged the influence of Italo Svevo's La conciencia de Zeno on this novel (Pido la palabra, 252). Ritmo lento could be described as a psychological narrative; its innovation is its portrait of the mind of David Fuente, an individual at odds with society.

The novel contains a prologue, eleven chapters and an epilogue.