The Impostor: A True Story by Javier Cercas (English) Paperback Book

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MAN BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the acclaimed author of Outlaws • For decades, Enric Marco was revered as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a crusader for justice, and a Holocaust survivor. But in May 2005, at the height of his renown, he was exposed as a fraud.Marco was never in a Nazi concentration camp. And perhaps the rest of his past was fabricated, too, a combination of his delusions of grandeur and his compulsive lying. In this hypnotic narrative, which 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 probes one man's gigantic lie to explore the deepest, most flawed parts of our humanity.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Author Biography

Javier Cercas is a novelist and columnist whose books include Soldiers of Salamis, which has sold more than a million copies worldwide; The Speed of Light; The Anatomy of a Moment; Outlaws; and the novellas The Tenant and The Motive. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have received numerous international awards. He lives in Barcelona.

Review

"A fascinating and suspenseful historical whodunit." —The New York Times Book Review"Thrilling. . . . [The Impostor] vibrates with an insomniac energy. I did, too, while in its throes. There's no looking away from it; it has the hot, charged energy of sitting through a trial." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times"Magnificent. . . . A rigorous and obsessive quest to untangle what is true and what is false. . . . A subtle essay on the nature of fiction and the ways in which it can invade our lives and transform them." —The Wall Street Journal"Fascinating, highly charged, scalpel-sharp." —The Times (London)"The Impostor is a true story that even the most fanciful yarn-spinner would blush to invent. . . . No Spanish writer has probed the unhealed wounds of the country's history with more subtlety and rigour than Cercas." —The Economist"A humane, artistically responsible and civilised book, one that you finish feeling heartened that such a serious-minded writer as Cercas is at work." —The Sunday Times (London)"[A] mesmerizing biography." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Incandescent . . . Magnificent. . . . Fiction has replaced reality in the world we live in, and average characters from the real world don't interest us. Fabricators do." —Mario Vargas Llosa, El País"While The Impostor is a biography and an historical essay, it is also a meditation on lies and fiction. . . . Javier Cercas' trenchant writing, his range of reference, and incisive commentary . . . make his book compelling (and instructive) reading." —The Washington Times"Cercas is a master of narrative nonfiction. . . . [He] presents the conundrum of a country only just beginning to reconcile itself to a complicated past." —Foreign Policy"Both convincing and compelling. . . . A piece of nifty journalistic detective work, Cercas's book is an insightful psychological study." —The Spectator"A charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and fictions we construct." —Kirkus Reviews"With generosity, empathy, and self-deprecation, Cercas draws fine lines: between history and 'historical memory,' fabricators and novelists, sanity and insanity, heroism and cravenness." —Tablet"Cervas probes this mysterious and extraordinary life with uncommon patience, uncommon skill and uncommon sympathy. He reminds us that he is himself a novelist and that novelists tell lies as a means of pointing to some sort of truth." —The Scotsman"Remarkable. . . . Cercas' analysis of post-Franco Spain will be invaluable for any non-Spaniard trying to understand this complex period. Yet it's not just for this that The Impostor is a great book. It is also because of the intellectual depth and even-handedness with which Cercas explores [his subject's] lifelong lie and his motivations for telling it." —El País"An important investigation of the role of the writer, the nature of truth and the battle between memory and history." —BookPage"An awful lot here resonates—not just the buzzy issues of myth-making that dominate much of contemporary politics, but more enduring questions about the nature of truth and storytelling." —Daily Mail

Review Quote

"It is thrilling to be in the room with the two of them once their cat-and-mouse game commences. . . [ The Impostor ] vibrates with an insomniac energy. I did, too, while in its throes. There''s no looking away from it; it has the hot, charged energy of sitting through a trial. . . The brilliance of The Impostor is how Cercas connects Marco''s desire for reinvention with Spain''s national project of burying its history as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. . . The language is precise, distinctive and delicious. . . Is there a more gifted or versatile translator working today than Frank Wynne'. . . The voice of this book, the voice of Cercas, with its beautiful grain and restlessness, its swerves from pity to fury, from calm to hysteria, owe much to Wynne''s almost musical modulations." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Luminous. . . Magnificent. . . As well as an incisive piece of journalistic investigation, Mr. Cercas''s book is a subtle essay on the nature of fiction and the ways in which it can invade our lives and transform them. . . But his sickness is a sickness of our time, of a culture in which truth is less important than appearance and in which performing is the best (and perhaps the only) way of being and living. Fiction has replaced reality in today''s world and, for that reason, the everyday characters of the real world no longer interest or entertain us. Fantasists do." -- Mario Vargas Llosa, The Wall Street Journal "A fascinating and suspenseful historical whodunit . . . One of the highlights of Cercas''s portrait of his impostor quarry is a tour de force imposture of his own . . . In fact the book almost takes on the shadow of a novel in which Marco the hardened con man seems to play the long game . . . But though Cercas seems on the verge of being taken in, it turns out that he has been conning the con man." --Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Times Book Review "Javier Cercas''s trenchant writing, his range of reference, and incisive commentary soon make his book compelling (and instructive) reading." --Claire Hopley, Washington Times "Acclaimed Spanish novelist Cercas looks deeply at the curious case of a man who wasn''t there . . . A charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and fictions we construct." -- Kirkus Reviews "An important investigation of the role of the writer, the nature of truth, and the battle between memory and history." --Deborah Mason, BookPage "Insightful . . . With generosity, empathy, and self-deprecation, Cercas draws fine lines: between history and ''historical memory,'' fabricators and novelists, sanity and insanity, heroism and cravenness . . . Cercas gives us a universal investigation into the morals of storytelling and historical narrative." --Matthew Fishbane, Tablet magazine "Remarkable, fascinating . . . Cercas''s analysis of post-Franco Spain will be invaluable for any non-Spaniard trying to understand this complex period. Yet it''s not just for this that The Impostor is a great book. It is also because of the intellectual depth and even-handedness with which Cercas explores Marco''s lifelong lie and his motivations for telling it." --Mark Nayler, El Pa

Excerpt from Book

Part I: The Onion Skin 1 I did not want to write this book. I didn''t know exactly why I did not want to write it, or rather I did, but did not want to acknowledge it, or did not dare acknowledge it; or not entirely. The fact is that for more than seven years I resisted writing this book. During that time, I wrote two others, but I never forgot this o≠ on the contrary: after my fashion, while I was writing those two books, I was also writing this one. Or perhaps, after its fashion, this book was writing me. The first paragraphs of a book are always the last to be written. This book is finished. This paragraph is the last I am writing. And, since it is the last, I now know why I didn''t want to write this book. I didn''t want to write it because I was afraid. This is what I have known since the beginning but did not want to acknowledge, or did not dare acknowled≥ or not entirely. What I did not know until now is that my fear was completely warranted. *** I met Enric Marco in June 2009, four years after he became the great impostor and the great pariah. Many people still remember his story. Marco was an octogenarian from Barcelona who, for almost three decades, had passed himself off as a deportado - a deportee - to Hitler''s Germany and a survivor of the Nazi camps, for three years he had been president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the principal Spanish association for survivors of Mauthausen, he had given hundreds of lectures and dozens of interviews, he had received a number of significant official distinctions, and had addressed the Spanish parliament on behalf of his supposed companions in misfortune, until it was discovered in early May 2005 that he had not been deported and had never been a prisoner in a Nazi camp. The discovery was made by an obscure historian named Benito Bermejo, shortly before the commemoration ceremony at the former Mauthausen camp to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, a ceremony at which, for the first time, a Spanish prime minister was to be in attendance and at which Marco was to play an important role, one he was forced to relinquish at the last minute after his imposture was exposed. When I met Marco, I had just published my tenth book, The Anatomy of a Moment , but I was going through a difficult time. Even I did not understand why. My family seemed happy, the book was a success; it is true that my father had died, but he had died almost a year earlier, more than enough time to have coped with his death. The fact is that, I don''t know how, but I came to the conclusion that the blame for my depression was my recently published book: not (or not entirely) because it had left me physically and mentally exhausted; but also (or more importantly) because it was a curious book, a strange novel-without-fiction, a rigorously true story, devoid of the slightest trace of invention or imagination. I thought that this was what had killed me. Day and night I repeated a mantra to myself: "Reality kills, fiction saves." In the meantime I was struggling to deal with anxiety and the panic attacks, I would go to sleep crying, wake up crying and spend the day hiding from people so that I could cry some more. I decided that the solution was to write another book. Though I had no shortage of ideas, the problem was that most of them were for non-fiction narratives. But I also had ideas for fictions; three in particular: the first was a novel about a professor of metaphysics at the University of Pontificia de Comillas who falls in love like a rutting boar with a porn star and ends up travelling to Budapest to meet her personally, declare his love and ask her to marry him; the second was called Tanga and was the first of a series of crime novels featuring a detective called Juan Luis Manguerazo; the third dealt with my father and began with a scene in which I brought him back to life and we devoured fried eggs with chorizo and frogs'' legs at El Figón, a restaurant in the Cáceres of his youth where we had often eaten together. I attempted to write these three fictions; with all three I failed. One day, my wife gave me an ultimatum: either I made an appointment with a psychoanalyst, or she made one with a divorce lawyer. I did not have time to visit the psychoanalyst that she recommended. He was a bald man, cold and twisted, with an unplaceable accent (sometimes he sounded Chilean or Mexican, sometimes Catalan, or maybe Russian), who, in our early sessions, was constantly berating me for showing up at his surgery in articulo mortis . I have spent my life making fun of psychoanalysts and their pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo; but I would be lying if I said that our sessions were not useful: at least they gave me a place where I could sob uncontrollably; but I would also be lying if I did not confess that, more than once, I felt like getting up from the couch and punching the psychoanalyst. He, for his part, attempted to guide me towards two conclusions. The first was that the blame for all my unhappiness was not my novel-without-fiction or true story, but my mother, which explained why I often left his consulting room with the urge to strangle her the next time I set eyes on her; the second conclusion was that my life was a charade and I was a charlatan, that I had chosen literature so that I could have a life that was free, happy and authentic whereas actually my life was false, servile and unhappy, that I was a guy who pretended to be a novelist, and succeeded by deceiving and cheating peop≤ in reality I was nothing more than an impostor. The latter conclusion eventually came to seem more plausible (and less hackneyed) than the former. And it was this that prompted me to remember Marco; Marco and a long-forgotten conversation about Marco in which I had been called an impostor. Here I need to go back a few years, to the moment when the Marco scandal first broke. It triggered an outrage that resonated around the world, but in Catalonia, where Marco had been born and had lived almost all of his life, and where he had been a very popular man, the revelation of his imposture made a greater impression than it did anywhere else. So, even if there were no other reason, it was logical that I, too, was interested in his case. But there was another reason; furthermore, the verb "to be interested" is inadequate: rather than simply being interested in Marco''s case, I immediately came up with the idea of writing about him, as though I sensed in Marco some profound connection. This worried me; it also produced a feeling of vertigo, an inchoate dread. The truth is that all the while the scandal played out in the media I devoured everything that was written about Marco and, when I discovered that a number of people close to me knew or had known Marco or had been aware of the man, I invited them to a dinner at my house to talk about him. The dinner took place in mid-May 2005, shortly after the story broke. At the time, I was teaching in the University of Gerona and living in the suburbs in a little semi-detached house with a garden. To the best of my recollection, in addition to my son, my wife and my sister Blanca, those present that evening included two of my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts: Anna María García and Xavier Pla. My sister Blanca was the only one of us who knew Marco well, because years earlier she and he had been on the board of FaPaC - the Federation of Associations of Parents of Schoolchildren in Catalonia - in which both had long served as vice-chair: she in the Gerona district, Marco in Barcelona. To everyone''s surprise, over dinner, Blanca painted a picture of a charming, hyperactive, flirtatious and witty old man who was desperate to appear in photographs and, without troubling to hide the affection she had felt at the time for the great impostor and the great pariah, she recounted the projects, the meetings, the anecdotes and the trips she had shared with him. Anna María and Xavier did not know Marco personally (or knew him only superficially), but both had studied the Holocaust and the Deportation and seemed as fascinated by the case as I was: Xavier, a young professor of Catalan literature, loaned me various texts concerning Marco, including the two most comprehensive biographical accounts of his life; for her part, Anna María, a veteran historian who had never abandoned the noble concept of civic responsibility instilled in the intellectuals of her generation, had friends and acquaintances in the Amical de Mauthausen, the association for camp survivors of which Marco had been president, and had been in Mauthausen a couple of days before the scandal exploded attending the commemoration ceremonies of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, where she was among the first to hear of the discovery of Marco''s imposture; she had even dined there with Benito Bermejo, the historian who had just unmasked him. As I remember it, when we talked about Marco in the garden of my house that afternoon, Xavier and I were more baffled than anything; Blanca somewhere between being baffled and amused (though on the whole she tried to hide her amusement, perhaps for fear of shocking us); Anna María, simply outraged: over and over she said that Marco was a scoundrel, a compulsive, barefaced liar who had mocked the whole world, but in particular the victims of the most terrible crime in history. At some point, as though she had suddenly become aware of a blindingly obvious fact, Anna María said, her eyes boring into me: "So, tell me, why did you organise this dinner? Why are you interested in Marco? You''re not thinking of writing about him?" The three point-blank questions caught me unawares an

Details ISBN0525434232 Author Frank Wynne Short Title IMPOSTOR Pages 384 Language English ISBN-10 0525434232 ISBN-13 9780525434238 Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2019 Publication Date 2019-07-02 Subtitle A True Story Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-07-02 NZ Release Date 2019-07-02 US Release Date 2019-07-02 UK Release Date 2019-07-02 Place of Publication New York Translator Frank Wynne Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Vintage Books Audience General We've got this

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