It is thrilling to be in the room with the two of them once their cat-and-mouse game commences: Marco, unctuous, a savant of manipulation; Cercas, recoiling in his chair, empathizing against his will, trying desperately not to be used ... This torsion — from outrage to compassion to revulsion to baffled admiration to outrage all over again — gives the book its squirmy drama. It vibrates with an insomniac energy. I did, too, while in its throes ... The brilliance of The Impostor is how Cercas connects Marco’s desire for reinvention with Spain’s national project of burying its history as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy ... The language is precise, distinctive and delicious. Is there a more gifted or versatile translator working today than Frank Wynne? ... The voice of this book, the voice of Cercas, with its beautiful grain and restlessness, its swerves from pity to fury, from calm to hysteria, owe much to Wynne’s almost musical modulations.
Mr. 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.
... fascinating ... A singular tension...pervades the back-and-forth narrative, in which the cunning Marco tries to distort and conceal what really happened and Cercas, with his incantatory prose, strips away every fraudulent ruse. He is careful, all the while, to be fair and judicious ... Readers will be impressed by how scrupulously Cercas pursues the facts, in obvious contrast to Marco’s incessant obfuscation. By questioning his own motives and methods at every step, by making sure to separate what is indubitable from what is conjecture, he shows us how to systematically dismantle any web of lies, constructing a model of 'reflective skepticism' from which we have much to learn in our era of rampant conspiracy theories and viral Internet falsehoods ... The Impostor tells a deeper and hidden truth about Spain ... The Impostor [is] a book that is woefully relevant well beyond the frontiers of Spain.
[Cercas] often presents himself on the page as a bit of a neurotic bumbler, the better to work doubts and second thoughts into his formidably polished storytelling ... The resulting book has three strands: the story – or stories – that Marco told about himself at different times in his life; the truth as far as Cercas was able to ascertain it; and the meta-story of Cercas’s investigation, including his shifting feelings about Marco, which range from empathy to revulsion and lead to further self-questioning ... Cercas worries away at these questions as he goes about telling Marco’s story, which he does with great skill, some impressive detective work and an irony that’s sometimes amused and sometimes appalled ... There’s also a fair amount of essayistic musing that sometimes seems merely to be ringing the changes: Marco as novelist, Marco as Nietzschean self-creator, Marco as Don Quixote ... Marco’s standard line in those days was that Spanish democracy had been founded on lies, and that the country would never be at peace with itself until it faced up to the past and took corrective action. Cercas doesn’t disagree, though he points out that the pact of forgetting was a result of all too vivid remembering ... Cercas stops just short of making Marco more than a symbol of a national conversation that came to nothing.
...a fascinating, highly charged, scalpel-sharp dissection of Marco’s deception ... In the vein of true-crime accounts, such as In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary, Cercas inserts himself into this analysis, applying a ruthless logic to his own role and the consequences of his choices.
No Spanish writer has probed the unhealed wounds of the country’s history with more subtlety and rigour than Mr Cercas ... Mixing dogged research and testy, sparring interviews with the charming pretender, Mr Cercas scrupulously tracks Mr Marco’s big lie. As an author who juggles reality and fiction, he interrogates his own attraction to this saga of deceit.
It appears in English at a time when the debate about separating fake from fact is at the forefront of contemporary historical and political debate here. He decided he wanted to know not so much whether Marco lied (though he turns the question into a fascinating and suspenseful historical whodunit) but why ... The book is both a tribute to Cercas’s investigative zeal and a series of dramatic confrontations between the writer and the impostor ... One of the highlights of Cercas’s portrait of his impostor quarry is a tour de force imposture of his own, in which he captures Marco’s grandiose comic rhetoric — an imposture of an impostor ... But though Cercas seems on the verge of being taken in, it turns out that he has been conning the con man ... It’s satisfying to think that this monster has finally been painted into a corner.
Cercas, an author of both fiction and nonfiction, including the acclaimed novel The Soldiers of Salamis, struggles to disentangle the strands of truth from Marco’s web of lies ... Trying to understand Marco is like looking for a phantom in a house of mirrors, but Cercas’ attempt is an important investigation of the role of the writer, the nature of truth and the battle between memory and history.
Similar to Vonnegut in the telling of Slaughterhouse Five, Cercas writes this narrative in first person, bringing us along in the process step-by-step to give us the same internal turmoil that effects an author tasked with telling an ugly truth. By sharing this turmoil and challenging us to wrestle with our own falseness while we judge Marco’s, the reader has a chance to see beyond the surface. The author comes away a different man after writing the truth about an impostor and offers us the same chance.
Cercas ponders the case from every angle ... The answers come slowly, deliberately, and certainly not definitively ... Though long and occasionally repetitive, this is a charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and fictions we construct.
...[a] mesmerizing biography ... As Cercas investigates Marco’s psyche, he describes his own moral qualms about exposing his subject’s subterfuge ... This rigorous work shines a light not only on the methods of the deceiver but the willingness of the deceived to accept such falsehoods.
