The Impostor

Starred review from June 18, 2018
“The liar has no history,” novelist Cercas (Outlaws) declares at the start of this mesmerizing biography of a fraud, only to disprove that contention in his quest to understand Enric Marco, a Spanish man who for decades famously represented himself as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps. In 2005, at the age of 84, Marco was revealed to be a fraud who had, in fact, volunteered for a work detail in Germany during WWII to avoid his mandatory military service in Spain. Cercas, who interviewed Marco, depicts him as a charismatic narcissist who misrepresented his anarchist proclivities during the Spanish Civil War, changed his name repeatedly to escape his past, and lied his way into high-profile positions after the end of the Franco dictatorship, serving as a spokesperson for former Holocaust survivors and members of the resistance in Spain. As Cercas investigates Marco’s psyche, he describes his own moral qualms about exposing his subject’s subterfuge. He likens Marcos’s “novelistic imagination” to that of a fiction writer (such as himself) and also presents it as a personification of Spain in the post-Franco years, which invented “a noble and heroic past, in which most had been resistance fighters or anti-Franco dissidents.” This rigorous work shines a light not only on the methods of the deceiver but the willingness of the deceived to accept such falsehoods.

June 15, 2018
Acclaimed Spanish novelist Cercas (The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, 2018, etc.) looks deeply at the curious case of a man who wasn't there.Enric Marco (b. 1921), a Catalonian metalworker, became a cause célèbre first for having supposedly survived a Nazi concentration camp, for which he received medals and honors, and then for having been exposed for bending the facts to the point of breaking, apparently precisely in order to cash in on the fame. As Cercas digs into the story of this "swarthy, balding, thickset, burly, mustachioed gnome," Marco moves from object of "moral disgust" to something at once more understandable and more mysterious. Yes, Marco, an anarchist who was on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War ("his memories of this farce, however, are scant and unclear"), did go to Germany during World War II--but apparently voluntarily, having joined a labor detachment for a decent wage. Yes, he did run afoul of the Nazis, but apparently for an ordinary crime. Yes, he was jailed briefly, but he did not do time in the concentration camps, as he attested. Other claims of having been a hero of the Resistance melt away, leaving Cercas with what novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, his friend, had divined at the beginning: "Don't you get it? Marco is one of your characters!" Cercas ponders the case from every angle: Is it possible, he wonders, that even with the evasions and lies, Marco might tell us something truthful about the experience of fascism? Even though he "needed to be admired, to be a star," might he not have something to say after all? Who doesn't enjoy a little self-aggrandizing confabulation? The answers come slowly, deliberately, and certainly not definitively even as Marco transforms himself from man on the street to Holocaust survivor "just as, at a certain point, Alonso Quixano became Don Quixote."Though long and occasionally repetitive, this is a charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and fictions we construct.

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Starred review from August 1, 2018
Leading Spanish novelist Cercas (Outlaws?, 2014) probes the lies of a notorious fraudster and reveals uncomfortable truths about postwar Spain, the persistence of narcissism, and his own struggles to reconcile reality and fiction. Enric Marco, a metalworker from Barcelona, captured the public eye and brought at least one government official to tears with dramatic, and entirely false, accounts of his time in Nazi concentration camps. His fraud exposed, Marco continued to grasp after public affection, insisting that his deception was a noble lie that served the public interest. Cercas declares Marco a conman, a shameless charlatan, a peerless trickster and worries deeply about the morality of giving him the attention he desires. But Cercas cannot resist peeling back the onion skins from a man whose invention of history is almost literary in its audacity. Might Marco be Don Quixote, tripped up by his own longing for heroism? Or is his story more like Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), another novel without fiction in which the novelist's own ethics are implicated? Likewise compelling is what Marco's story reveals about postwar Spain's attempts to reinvent itself amid questions of complicity and constructed memory. Cercas' sophisticated and emotionally intelligent portrait of humanity at low ebb speaks with uncommon directness to our own historical moment. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2018

People once sobbed over the stories told by Holocaust survivor Enric Marco, but in May 2005 it was revealed that Marco had never been in a camp. Award-winning novelist Cercas (Soldiers of Salamis) writes a true story about deceit.

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