RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Cercas’s book is several books at once, but, above all, it is a rigorous and obsessive quest to untangle what is true and what is false in the private and public life of Enric Marco ... 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 ... Mr. Cercas does not want to find this supreme impostor likeable and, so that no one can have any doubts on the matter, he heaps condemnatory epithets upon him at every turn ... What is most striking is that the person who wins the game played out in this luminous book is not the straightforward Mr. Cercas but the devious Mr. Marco ... Excellent novelist though he is, Javier Cercas was so fascinated by the theme and subject matter of his book that he forgot that good novels always turn the bad characters into good because they always end up exerting over readers ... The book that he has written, even though he might not have wished it to turn out that way, is a (magnificent) novel about an uncommon character.
