(Original Review, 2014-11-24)
“The Impostor” is the story of Enric Marco, a fake holocaust survivor from the Flossenbürg concentration camp and one time chairman of the French association Amicale de Mauthausen. Cercas labels it a "novel without fiction", presumably because literary awards for fiction are sexier than those for non-fiction. It’s been done before, as Cercas points out, referencing Truman Capote and Emmanuel Carrère (but not poor Norman Mailer). To be fair, it’s been done before by Cercas as well. Ever since the success of "Soldier of Salamis" rescued his faltering literary career back in 2002, Cercas has been grafting fiction to varying degrees onto real life characters and events.
Enric Marco is also a textbook case. His story mirrors that of many other fake holocaust survivors and even fraudsters like disgraced 9/11 survivor Alicia Esteve Head aka Tania Head (also name checked). Cercas traces Marco’s motivation in his troubled childhood, born out of wedlock from a schizophrenic mother in a mental asylum and passed around different relatives eventually ending up with a sympathetic uncle. The diagnosis is pretty straightforward, Marco is a Narcissist (cluster B by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). And yet, while admitting his craving for admiration, it was empathy. The pop psychology is mercifully limited to passing guilt at having abandoned his mother in the asylum and lack of physical contact with his father, who never held his hand. Cercas is also happy to discount profiteering, an accusation otherwise leveled at Jerzy Kosiński after the publication of "The Painted Bird."
From the outset, Cercas displays a passive aggressive attitude towards Marco. He keeps procrastinating (possibly because he lacks the exclusive) and, I’d speculate, is only persuaded by the endorsement of Claudio Magris.
While I am morally and politically repelled by the character, I confess my admiration as a novelist for his prodigious narrative skills and his power of persuasion, akin to those of the greatest fantasizers in the history of literature. On top of that, Cercas’ son, Raul, who starts off videotaping the interviews with Marco, (before getting bored, or changing career, and dropping out), points out that Marco is a smarter version of Alonso Quijano who assumes the fantastical and fictional character of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel, whilst failing to be persuasive to any extent. Cercas establishes from the outset his position, he’s there to listen, not to justify. Problem is he ends up doing most of the talking. It takes him 60 odd pages to even get started (he has reservations, see) therefore exposing his own narcissism. Amidst countless narrative loops, Cercas does eventually get to the facts. Marco was never an anti-Franco, antifascist militant, he didn’t participate in the invasion of the Balearic Islands, he wasn’t captured by the Germans while acting for the Catalan resistance in France, but emigrated to Germany to work and escape military service. Alas, none of this is presented with any panache, as Cercas casts himself not as a historian but as a fact checker.
