Enric Marco is a ninety-year-old man from Barcelona who posed as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and who, until May 2005, when his deception was exposed, had served for three years as president of the Spanish association of survivors. He had given dozens of interviews to the press and on television, delivered hundreds of talks at schools, received numerous prestigious honours, and moved Spanish members of parliament with his speech-some of them to tears-when they gathered in parliament for the first time to pay tribute to the Republican deportees sent to Nazi camps by the Third Reich.
News of his deception spread around the world, transforming Marco from a hero into a great impostor, a reviled usurper of other people's heroism and history. But who was Enric Marco really? With the passion of a kamikaze, the author launches himself at the truth behind Marco's deception in order to plunge, with startling honesty, into the depths of our own existence: our inexhaustible capacity for self-deception, our everyday conformism and heroic lies, our insatiable thirst for affection and social recognition, our conflicting needs for fiction and reality, and the most painful areas of our recent historical past.
The result is a book that is not really about Enric Marco, but about each and every one of us. It is Javier Cercas's most subversive and radical work, an extraordinary book that boldly expands the boundaries of fiction and explores the outermost limits of humanity's relationship with its own image.