Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a charismatic Nazi concentration camp survivor, and more. In January 2005 he addressed the Spanish parliament to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is, everyone agrees, an extraordinary man. Heroic, almost.
The thing is, his extraordinary, heroic biography is at least partly a lie. But which parts?
In The Impostor, the novelist Javier Cercas seeks to disentangle Marco’s lies from those small provable truths supporting them. Cercas is reluctant at first (troubled by Primo Levi’s ‘to understand is almost to justify’); but Marco himself is a surprisingly willing participant in the investigatory process, granting Cercas multiple lengthy interviews. Does Marco’s unquenchable desire to be the centre of attention at all times simply trump his fear of being exposed as the serial liar that he is?
All Marco’s lies fit into a framework of historical truth, and the precise historical setting of Marco’s most audacious ones is significant: a country only recently out of civil war, struggling with the compromises of ‘historical memory’.
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