LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018
A TRUE STORY THAT IS PACKED WITH FICTION – FICTION CREATED BY ITS MAIN CHARACTER, ENRIC MARCO
But who is Enric Marco? A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a fighter against fascism, an impassioned campaigner for justice, and a survivor of the Nazi death camps? Or, is he simply an old man with delusions of grandeur, a charlatan who fabricated his heroic war record, who was never a prisoner in the Third Reich and never opposed Franco; a charming, beguiling and compulsive liar who refashioned himself as a defender of liberty and who was unmasked in 2005 at the height of his influence and renown?
In this extraordinary novel – part narrative, part history, part essay, part biography, part autobiography – Javier Cercas unravels the enigma of the man and delves with passion and honesty into the most ambiguous aspects of what makes us human – our infinite capacity for self-deception, our need for conformity, our thirst for affection and our conflicting needs for fiction and for truth.
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
A TRUE STORY THAT IS PACKED WITH FICTION – FICTION CREATED BY ITS MAIN CHARACTER, ENRIC MARCO
But who is Enric Marco? A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a fighter against fascism, an impassioned campaigner for justice, and a survivor of the Nazi death camps? Or, is he simply an old man with delusions of grandeur, a charlatan who fabricated his heroic war record, who was never a prisoner in the Third Reich and never opposed Franco; a charming, beguiling and compulsive liar who refashioned himself as a defender of liberty and who was unmasked in 2005 at the height of his influence and renown?
In this extraordinary novel – part narrative, part history, part essay, part biography, part autobiography – Javier Cercas unravels the enigma of the man and delves with passion and honesty into the most ambiguous aspects of what makes us human – our infinite capacity for self-deception, our need for conformity, our thirst for affection and our conflicting needs for fiction and for truth.
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
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Reviews
The Impostor is a humane, artistically responsible and civilised book, one that you finish feeling heartened that such a serious-minded writer as Cercas is at work.
No Spanish writer has probed the unhealed wounds of the country's history with more subtlety and rigour than Mr Cercas
Besides being a piece of nifty journalistic detective work, Cercas' book is an insightful psychological study . . . Both convincing and compelling
Truth and fiction blend in an outstanding novel about a Holocaust impostor
A very rich text, a true textile of interlinked threads of thought, of history and of stories . . . The Impostor is fiction dealing with the value of history; and it is a history about the vital value of fiction as a guarantor of reality
Javier Cercas is one of Europe's most serious and attractive writers . . . Cercas is not content with the easy story, in this case the unmasking of a false hero. He boldly searches for the hidden truths of his elusive subject and his times.
A fascinating, highly charged, scalpel-sharp dissection.
Masterly . . . Cercas probes this mysterious and extraordinary life with uncommon patience, uncommon skill and uncommon sympathy.
Cercas as added another literary page-turner to his unique oeuvre. He is a master at combining historical truth and fictional viewpoint.
A fascinating book, very much of our time in this era of fake news and what is called 'historical memories'.
[Cercas] goes about telling Marco's story with great skill, some impressive detective work and an irony that's sometimes amused and sometimes appalled
[A] mesmerizing biography of a fraud . . . This rigorous work shines a light not only on the methods of the deceiver but the willingness of the deceived to accept such falsehoods
[The Impostor] vibrates with an insomniac energy . . . it has the hot, charged energy of sitting through a trial . . . The language is precise, distinctive and delicious.
One of the most accomplished
books I've ever read
