The Impostor

Product Description

Who is Enric Marco? An old man from Barcelona who claims to be a Nazi concentration camp survivor & rises to be president of Spain's leading Holocaust survivor movement the Friends of Mauthausen By the time he is unmasked in Austria in 2005 on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp he has become a civic hero speaking at hundreds of conferences granting dozens of interviews receiving state honours publishing a successful memoir & even moving Spanish congressmen to tears at a memorial homage to Republicans deported by the Third Reich The case shocked the world & Enric Marco was labelled a great imposter to which he responded I am an impostor but not a fraud A decade later Javier Cercas addresses the enigma of the man his truths & lies & through an investigation that unravels Spain's history in the twentieth century delves with passion & unflinching honesty into that deepest part of human nature
- our infinite capacity for self-deception our need for conformity our lies our insatiable thirst for affection & our opposing needs for fiction & reality The Impostor is an extraordinary novel that not only tells Marco's self-deluding story but also challenges the reader to consider how truthful any of us is in the way we present ourselves in daily life Are we not all asks Cercas the novelists of our own lives? Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne