The Impostor: A True Story

Knopf. New. New Knopf, 2018 New


JAVIER CERCAS is the author of seven books, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and have received numerous international awards TRANSLATED by Frank Wynne

From the award-winning author of Soldiers of Salamis, a propulsive and riveting narrative investigation into an infamous fraud: a man who has been lying his entire life

Who is Enric Marco? An elderly man in his nineties, living in Barcelona, a Holocaust survivor who gave hundreds of speeches, granted dozens of interviews, received important national honors, and even moved government officials to tears But in May 2005, Marco was exposed as a fraud: he was never in a Nazi concentration camp The story was reported around the world, transforming him from hero to villain in the blink of an eye Now, more than a decade later--in a hypnotic narrative that combines fiction and nonfiction, detective story and war story, biography and autobiography--Javier Cercas sets out to unravel Marco's enigma With both profound compassion and lacerating honesty, Cercas takes the reader on a journey not only into one man's gigantic lie, but also--through its exploration of our infinite capacity for self-deception, our opposing needs for fantasy and reality, our appetite for affection--into the deepest, most flawed parts of our humanity

It is said that a book must be at least 350 pages long to stop a bullet - a discovery made by British volunteers during the Spanish Civil War who defended Madrid University behind barricades of the thickest books they could find (19th-century German philosophy, it seems) When I first read Javier Cercas, I had the eerie feeling his work was intended for just this purpose In scope and size (most comfortably meet that 350-page standard), his novels are interventions They stand between readers and what Cercas considers the gravest threats to us: the misapprehension and cynical use of the past "He who controls the past, controls the present and the future," Cercas writes in his new book, "The Impostor," longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize

"The Impostor," a work of nonfiction, is the history of an ugly and wildly successful lie For three decades, Enric Marco, a Catalan mechanic, was a prominent public face of Spanish survivors of the Holocaust - president of a survivors' association, the recipient of a number of awards and distinctions He spoke at Parliament and frequently visited schools, well into his 80s, to tearfully recall his time at the Flossenb�rg concentration camp; the torture and killings he witnessed; his eight months of solitary confinement

In 2005, the story was revealed to be a hoax In the national uproar, some newspapers called for Marco to take his own life

Cercas was appropriately scandalized, calling Marco "this shameless con artist, this out-and-out liar, this utter scoundrel" The author's moral horror was matched only by his physical disgust for the "swarthy, balding, thickset, burly, mustachioed gnome" (Garlands of epithets are a Cercas specialty; one more: "manipulative, obsequious, utterly unscrupulous parasite") He was repulsed by the glibness of Marco's rationalizations and their sheer number: So what if he embellished a little here and there, went a typical Marco plea, it was for a noble cause - "to educate younger generations about the horrors" Anyway, he wasn't really lying - everything he reported did happen, just not to him Aren't there bigger sinners out there? What about Kissinger?

Humbert Humbert couldn't tap dance like this

But Cercas couldn't shake a nagging sense of connection with the con man He becomes Marco's (balky, reproving) Boswell not to rehabilitate the man - as he reminds his subject sternly - but to understand why he lied, why he was believed and to investigate his own queasy feelings of kinship

It is thrilling to be in the room with the two of them once thei