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El impostor
He aquí una fascinante novela sin ficción saturada de ficción; la ficción no la pone el autor: la pone Enric Marco.
¿Quién es Enric Marco? Un nonagenario barcelonés que se hizo pasar por superviviente de los campos nazis y que fue desenmascarado en mayo de 2005, después de presidir durante tres años la asociación española de los supervivientes, pronunciar centenares de conferencias, conceder decenas de entrevistas, recibir importantes distinciones y conmover en algún caso hasta las lágrimas a los parlamentarios españoles reunidos para rendir homenaje por vez primera a los republicanos deportados por el III Reich. El caso dio la vuelta al mundo y convirtió a Marco en el gran impostor y el gran maldito. Ahora, casi una década más tarde, Javier Cercas asedia, en este thriller hipnótico que es también un banquete con muchos platos -narración, crónica, ensayo, biografía y autobiografía-, el enigma del personaje, su verdad y sus falsedades y, a través de esa indagación que recorre casi un siglo de historia de España, bucea con una pasión de kamikaze y una honestidad desgarradora en lo más profundo de nosotros mismos: en nuestra infinita capacidad de autoengaño, en nuestro conformismo y nuestras mentiras, en nuestra sed insaciable de afecto, en nuestras necesidades contrapuestas de ficción y de realidad, en las zonas más dolorosas de nuestro pasado reciente. El resultado es un libro que no habla de Enric Marco sino de usted, lector; también el libro más insumiso y radical de Javier Cercas: un libro asombroso que, con una audacia inédita, ensancha los límites del género novelesco y explora las últimas fronteras de nuestra humanidad.
¿Quién es Enric Marco? Un nonagenario barcelonés que se hizo pasar por superviviente de los campos nazis y que fue desenmascarado en mayo de 2005, después de presidir durante tres años la asociación española de los supervivientes, pronunciar centenares de conferencias, conceder decenas de entrevistas, recibir importantes distinciones y conmover en algún caso hasta las lágrimas a los parlamentarios españoles reunidos para rendir homenaje por vez primera a los republicanos deportados por el III Reich. El caso dio la vuelta al mundo y convirtió a Marco en el gran impostor y el gran maldito. Ahora, casi una década más tarde, Javier Cercas asedia, en este thriller hipnótico que es también un banquete con muchos platos -narración, crónica, ensayo, biografía y autobiografía-, el enigma del personaje, su verdad y sus falsedades y, a través de esa indagación que recorre casi un siglo de historia de España, bucea con una pasión de kamikaze y una honestidad desgarradora en lo más profundo de nosotros mismos: en nuestra infinita capacidad de autoengaño, en nuestro conformismo y nuestras mentiras, en nuestra sed insaciable de afecto, en nuestras necesidades contrapuestas de ficción y de realidad, en las zonas más dolorosas de nuestro pasado reciente. El resultado es un libro que no habla de Enric Marco sino de usted, lector; también el libro más insumiso y radical de Javier Cercas: un libro asombroso que, con una audacia inédita, ensancha los límites del género novelesco y explora las últimas fronteras de nuestra humanidad.
420 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2014
About the author
Javier Cercas
63 books856 followersJavier Cercas Mena (Ibahernando, provincia de Caceres, 1962) es un escritor y traductor español.
Hijo de un veterinario rural, cuando contaba cuatro años, en 1966 su familia se trasladó a Tarragona, y allí estudió con los jesuitas. Es primo carnal del político Alejandro Cercas. A los quince años la lectura de Jorge Luis Borges le inclinó para siempre a la escritura. En 1985 se licenció en Filología Hispánica en la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona y más tarde se doctoró. Trabajó durante dos años en la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana; mientras estaba allí se publicó su primera novela, El móvil, y compuso su segunda novela; desde 1989 es profesor de literatura española en la Universidad de Girona. Está casado y tiene un hijo. Se transformó en un autor de masas con su tercera novela, Soldados de Salamina (2001), que fue descubierta por Mario Vargas Llosa en un famoso artículo y mereció los elogios de John Maxwell Coetzee y Susan Sontag. Es colaborador habitual de la edición catalana y del suplemento dominical del diario El País.
Su obra ha sido traducida a más de veinte lenguas. Por su parte él mismo ha traducido a autores catalanes contemporáneos y a H. G. Wells.
Hijo de un veterinario rural, cuando contaba cuatro años, en 1966 su familia se trasladó a Tarragona, y allí estudió con los jesuitas. Es primo carnal del político Alejandro Cercas. A los quince años la lectura de Jorge Luis Borges le inclinó para siempre a la escritura. En 1985 se licenció en Filología Hispánica en la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona y más tarde se doctoró. Trabajó durante dos años en la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana; mientras estaba allí se publicó su primera novela, El móvil, y compuso su segunda novela; desde 1989 es profesor de literatura española en la Universidad de Girona. Está casado y tiene un hijo. Se transformó en un autor de masas con su tercera novela, Soldados de Salamina (2001), que fue descubierta por Mario Vargas Llosa en un famoso artículo y mereció los elogios de John Maxwell Coetzee y Susan Sontag. Es colaborador habitual de la edición catalana y del suplemento dominical del diario El País.
Su obra ha sido traducida a más de veinte lenguas. Por su parte él mismo ha traducido a autores catalanes contemporáneos y a H. G. Wells.
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March 28, 2020
Σ' ένα εκτενές έργο που ο όρος μη μυθοπλαστικό μυθιστόρημα (non-fiction novel) αποδίδει καλύτερα από κάθε άλλον το είδος του, ο Χαβιέρ Θέρκας πραγματεύεται τη ζωή και τα ψέματα ενός σύγχρονου Δον Κιχώτη, ενός ανθρώπου που, όπως ο Αλόνσο Κιχάνο, διψώντας για φήμη και δόξα, κι επιθυμώντας τα κατορθώματά του να μείνουν χαραγμένα στην μνήμη των ανθρώπων, επινόησε έναν έτερο, ηρωικό εαυτό.
Αντικατέστησε την πληκτική ζωή του μηχανικού με την συγκλονιστική ζωή ενός συνδικαλιστή ηγέτη, υπέρμαχου της πολιτικής ελευθερίας, της κοινωνικής δικαιοσύνης και της ιστορικής μνήμης. Έγινε η ζωή που δεν έζησε κι έκανε όλον τον κόσμο να πιστεύει ότι αυτός, ο Ενρίκε Μάρκο, υπήρξε πράγματι υπερασπιστής της δημοκρατίας και αδιαμφισβήτητος αντιφασίστας στον πόλεμο, παράνομος αντιστασιακός στα χρόνια του φρανκισμού και μόνιμος θαμώνας των μπουντρουμιών της δικτατορίας, πολιτικός ηγέτης της εργατιάς και εκτοπισμένος στο ναζιστικό στρατοπεδο του Φλόσσενμπεργκ.
Αλλά, κατά πως λένε, "το ψέμα δεν ζει να γεράσει". Αργά ή γρήγορα αποκαλύπτεται γυμνό, χωρίς φτιασιδώματα, και ο παραμυθάς έρχεται αντιμέτωπος με το αληθινό παρελθόν του, αυτό που πάσχιζε να ξορκίσει, να συγκαλύψει, να ωραιοποιήσει. Στην περίπτωση του Ενρίκε Μάρκο τη θρυαλλίδα πυροδότησε ένας αληθινός ιστορικός ονόματι Μπενίτο Μπερμέχο, που, πρώτος αυτός, διαπίστωσε ότι ο "απατεώνας" Μάρκο κατέληξε στην Γερμανία του Χίτλερ όχι ως εκτοπισμένος Ισπανός δημοκρατικός, αλλά ως εθελοντής εργάτης.
Τη ζωή και τα ψέματα αυτού του "διαπρεπούς παλιάτσου" (ο χαρακτηρισμός ανήκει στον Βάργκας Λιόσα) αναδεικνύει στον Απατεώνα ο Θέρκας, ασφαλώς χωρίς διδακτισμό, δηκτική διάθεση και ηθικολογίες. Μέσα από ιστορικά τεκμήρια κι από τις πολυάριθμες συνεντεύξεις τόσο του ίδιου του Ενρίκε Μάρκο, όσο και των ανθρώπων που τον είχαν γνωρίσει, ο συγγραφέας ξεφλουδίζει το παρελθόν του "απατεώνα", αφαιρώντας ένα ένα τα παραμύθια του. Ταυτόχρονα, με στοχαστική διάθεση κι έναν λόγο (σχεδόν) δοκιμιακό, ο Θέρκας διακρίνει μεταξύ ιστορίας και συλλογικής μνήμης, μυθοπλασίας και πραγματικοτητας, αλήθειας και ψεύδους, μην λησμονώντας ότι αυτό το τελευταίο (το ψεύδος, δηλαδή) μπορεί κατά περίπτωση να είναι ζωτικό, γενναίο ή απλώς επωφελές.
"...Ο Μάρκο είχε δίκιο όταν έλεγε στις διαλέξεις του ότι η ιστορία της ζωή ςτου ήταν μια αντανάκλαση της ιστορίας της χώρας του, όχι όμως επειδή η ιστορία της ζωής του είχε την παραμικρή σχέση με την ιστορία που εκείνος αφηγούνταν - μια ιστορία ποιητική και απαστράπτουσα, γεμάτη ηρωισμό, αξιοπρέπεια και υψηλά αισθήματα-, αλλά επειδή ήταν πάνω απ' όλα η ιστορία που έκρυβε - μια ιστορία πεζή και κοινότοπη, γεμάτη αποτυχία, αναξιοπρέπεια και δειλία..."
Εξαιρετικό.
Αντικατέστησε την πληκτική ζωή του μηχανικού με την συγκλονιστική ζωή ενός συνδικαλιστή ηγέτη, υπέρμαχου της πολιτικής ελευθερίας, της κοινωνικής δικαιοσύνης και της ιστορικής μνήμης. Έγινε η ζωή που δεν έζησε κι έκανε όλον τον κόσμο να πιστεύει ότι αυτός, ο Ενρίκε Μάρκο, υπήρξε πράγματι υπερασπιστής της δημοκρατίας και αδιαμφισβήτητος αντιφασίστας στον πόλεμο, παράνομος αντιστασιακός στα χρόνια του φρανκισμού και μόνιμος θαμώνας των μπουντρουμιών της δικτατορίας, πολιτικός ηγέτης της εργατιάς και εκτοπισμένος στο ναζιστικό στρατοπεδο του Φλόσσενμπεργκ.
Αλλά, κατά πως λένε, "το ψέμα δεν ζει να γεράσει". Αργά ή γρήγορα αποκαλύπτεται γυμνό, χωρίς φτιασιδώματα, και ο παραμυθάς έρχεται αντιμέτωπος με το αληθινό παρελθόν του, αυτό που πάσχιζε να ξορκίσει, να συγκαλύψει, να ωραιοποιήσει. Στην περίπτωση του Ενρίκε Μάρκο τη θρυαλλίδα πυροδότησε ένας αληθινός ιστορικός ονόματι Μπενίτο Μπερμέχο, που, πρώτος αυτός, διαπίστωσε ότι ο "απατεώνας" Μάρκο κατέληξε στην Γερμανία του Χίτλερ όχι ως εκτοπισμένος Ισπανός δημοκρατικός, αλλά ως εθελοντής εργάτης.
Τη ζωή και τα ψέματα αυτού του "διαπρεπούς παλιάτσου" (ο χαρακτηρισμός ανήκει στον Βάργκας Λιόσα) αναδεικνύει στον Απατεώνα ο Θέρκας, ασφαλώς χωρίς διδακτισμό, δηκτική διάθεση και ηθικολογίες. Μέσα από ιστορικά τεκμήρια κι από τις πολυάριθμες συνεντεύξεις τόσο του ίδιου του Ενρίκε Μάρκο, όσο και των ανθρώπων που τον είχαν γνωρίσει, ο συγγραφέας ξεφλουδίζει το παρελθόν του "απατεώνα", αφαιρώντας ένα ένα τα παραμύθια του. Ταυτόχρονα, με στοχαστική διάθεση κι έναν λόγο (σχεδόν) δοκιμιακό, ο Θέρκας διακρίνει μεταξύ ιστορίας και συλλογικής μνήμης, μυθοπλασίας και πραγματικοτητας, αλήθειας και ψεύδους, μην λησμονώντας ότι αυτό το τελευταίο (το ψεύδος, δηλαδή) μπορεί κατά περίπτωση να είναι ζωτικό, γενναίο ή απλώς επωφελές.
"...Ο Μάρκο είχε δίκιο όταν έλεγε στις διαλέξεις του ότι η ιστορία της ζωή ςτου ήταν μια αντανάκλαση της ιστορίας της χώρας του, όχι όμως επειδή η ιστορία της ζωής του είχε την παραμικρή σχέση με την ιστορία που εκείνος αφηγούνταν - μια ιστορία ποιητική και απαστράπτουσα, γεμάτη ηρωισμό, αξιοπρέπεια και υψηλά αισθήματα-, αλλά επειδή ήταν πάνω απ' όλα η ιστορία που έκρυβε - μια ιστορία πεζή και κοινότοπη, γεμάτη αποτυχία, αναξιοπρέπεια και δειλία..."
Εξαιρετικό.
December 26, 2016
He disfrutado mucho con algunas obras del Sr Cercas (“Soldados de Salamina”, “La velocidad de la luz”, “Anatomía de un instante”), cosa que no puedo decir de la presente “El Impostor”. A pesar de que el personaje central, Enric Marco, me parecía digno de una obra extensa, a medida que pasaba las páginas he ido perdiendo interés. Demasiados datos, demasiados añadidos, demasiadas páginas. Hay cosas en ellas que me han sobrado, para concluir su lectura sin saber si al final he leído una novela, un ensayo o una fracasada mezcla de ambos.
En definitiva, creo que el autor ha dado un ligero paso atrás con esta publicación, que, para más INRI, se ha llevado el premio al mejor libro europeo, concedido en Bruselas.
Espero que el Sr Cercas siga deleitándonos en el futuro con sus buenas obras. De la presente preferiré olvidarme, pensando simplemente que este relato no era para mí.
En definitiva, creo que el autor ha dado un ligero paso atrás con esta publicación, que, para más INRI, se ha llevado el premio al mejor libro europeo, concedido en Bruselas.
Espero que el Sr Cercas siga deleitándonos en el futuro con sus buenas obras. De la presente preferiré olvidarme, pensando simplemente que este relato no era para mí.
October 17, 2020
Gerçekleri daha iyi anlatabilmek için yalana ihtiyaç duymalı mıyız? Peki, yalanlar bizi gerçeklerden korurlar mı? Gerçekleri bir miktar yalanla soslamak bizi ahlaki açıdan hatalı duruma düşürür mü? İyi niyetle söylendiği iddia edilen bir yalan bizi rahatsız etmemeli mi? Yalanlara bilerek inandığımız olur mu ve bu durum bizi bir sorumluluk altına sokar mı? Yalan olduğunu bilsek de duymak istediğimiz şeyler olabilir mi?
Enric Marco skandalını anlattığı romanında Cercas, bize aşağı yukarı bu soruların cevapları üzerine düşünmeye yöneltiyor. Bunu yaparken Platon’un yalanın amacına dönük “hoşgörüsünden”, Montaigne’nin diğerkam yalan görüşünden ve Kant’ın yalanın her türünün yasaklanması yönündeki fikirlerinden yararlanarak hikayeye eklemlendiriyor.
Diğer yandan Cercas, böyle bir kitap nasıl yazılabiliri de sorguluyor. Hatta böyle bir sahtekarın kitabı yazılmalı mı ya da bu kitabı yazmak bir sahtekarı aklar mı sorularının cevaplarını da arıyor.
Bu kitabı en kısa bu şekilde anlatabilirim sanırım. Hararetle tavsiye ediyorum.
Enric Marco skandalını anlattığı romanında Cercas, bize aşağı yukarı bu soruların cevapları üzerine düşünmeye yöneltiyor. Bunu yaparken Platon’un yalanın amacına dönük “hoşgörüsünden”, Montaigne’nin diğerkam yalan görüşünden ve Kant’ın yalanın her türünün yasaklanması yönündeki fikirlerinden yararlanarak hikayeye eklemlendiriyor.
Diğer yandan Cercas, böyle bir kitap nasıl yazılabiliri de sorguluyor. Hatta böyle bir sahtekarın kitabı yazılmalı mı ya da bu kitabı yazmak bir sahtekarı aklar mı sorularının cevaplarını da arıyor.
Bu kitabı en kısa bu şekilde anlatabilirim sanırım. Hararetle tavsiye ediyorum.
October 23, 2020
Cercas ın bizi iki konuda yanıltmayacağından artık neredeyse eminim. Birincisi yazdıklarının bizi bazı kavramlar üzerine ve bu kavramların bizdeki karşılığı üzerine derin düşüncelere bulaştırması. Ikincisi edebiyatın sınırlarını fütursuzca ve büyük bir ustlıkla zorlaması.
November 22, 2020
İçimden gelmedi değil, ama Cercas’ın yakıştırdığı tanımla ‘’imkânsız’’ bir kitaba 5 yıldız vermemeyi tercih ettim. Bu naçizane eksiltmeyle, Sahtekâr’ın taşıdığı bu güzel imkânsızlık nişanına iltifat etmek istedim.
Kitabın farklı katmanlarını birbirine bağlayan ve bazı bölümlerde uzun uzun açılan 'kurmaca kurtarır' 'geçmiş hiçbir zaman geçmez' gibi birkaç nefis leitmotiv ve Don Quijote benzeştirmeleri dışında anlatının biyografi sınırları içinde kalması biraz sıkıcıydı.
Bütün etik boyutlarıyla tartışmaya açılan bu büyük çaplı yalancılık meselesinde eğer suçluysa tek suç ortağı kendisi olan kahramanımızın kitabın ister istemez tek karakteri olması biraz sıkıcıydı. Cercas’ın kendi varlığı ve romanı yazma süreci Salamina Askerleri’ndeki kadar baskın değildi.
Suçluyu anlamak, onu desteklemek veya onunla bir anlamda korkutucu şekilde bütünleşmek midir? Roman tabii ki yalnızca Enric Marco’yu anlamak derdini taşıyor olamazdı. Cercas da az anasının gözü değil. Sahtekâr’da kurmacayı yazmak ve kurmacayı yaşama taşımak üzerinden yürüyen tartışmayı net bir taraf olarak, yani bir roman yazarak ortaya koyması, daha doğrusu bu yolla başarılı bir romancılık deneyi yapması hayranlık uyandırıcı gerçekten.
Son olarak, bıyıklarını boyayan bir adamın coşkun söylemlerine kitleler halinde inanan saf yürekli Katalonya halkına buradan selamlarımı gönderiyorum ajhdgf
Kitabın farklı katmanlarını birbirine bağlayan ve bazı bölümlerde uzun uzun açılan 'kurmaca kurtarır' 'geçmiş hiçbir zaman geçmez' gibi birkaç nefis leitmotiv ve Don Quijote benzeştirmeleri dışında anlatının biyografi sınırları içinde kalması biraz sıkıcıydı.
Bütün etik boyutlarıyla tartışmaya açılan bu büyük çaplı yalancılık meselesinde eğer suçluysa tek suç ortağı kendisi olan kahramanımızın kitabın ister istemez tek karakteri olması biraz sıkıcıydı. Cercas’ın kendi varlığı ve romanı yazma süreci Salamina Askerleri’ndeki kadar baskın değildi.
Suçluyu anlamak, onu desteklemek veya onunla bir anlamda korkutucu şekilde bütünleşmek midir? Roman tabii ki yalnızca Enric Marco’yu anlamak derdini taşıyor olamazdı. Cercas da az anasının gözü değil. Sahtekâr’da kurmacayı yazmak ve kurmacayı yaşama taşımak üzerinden yürüyen tartışmayı net bir taraf olarak, yani bir roman yazarak ortaya koyması, daha doğrusu bu yolla başarılı bir romancılık deneyi yapması hayranlık uyandırıcı gerçekten.
Son olarak, bıyıklarını boyayan bir adamın coşkun söylemlerine kitleler halinde inanan saf yürekli Katalonya halkına buradan selamlarımı gönderiyorum ajhdgf
October 22, 2020
“Salamina Askerleri” ile tanıştığım Javier Cercas’tan ilginç bir roman/anlatı kitabı. Kitaba adını veren büyük sahtekar Enric Marco’nun hikayesi anlatılıyor kitapta. Bu zeki ama tehlikeli insanın inşa ettiği kısmen gerçeklerden beslenen kurmaca otobiyografisini araştırarak gerçeğe ulaşmayı hedefliyor.
Katıksız bir bencillik, cehalet ve şuursuzluk abidesi Marco’nun yalan ve sahtekarlıklarını kitabına alırken kendini de sorgulama hatta özeleştiri yapma gereği duyuyor. Bu bölümler beni çok etkiledi, ikilemde kalmanın ne olduğunu çok güzel betimliyor. Kitabın öyküsünün yakıcılığı edebi yönünün önüne geçiyor olsa da Cercas çok iyi bir yazar, kurgudan da net olarak anlaşılıyor zaten.
Bazen Enric Marco için “iyi niyetli yalancı” noktasına geliyor Cercas. Ama finalinde net olarak ortaya çıktığı gibi katıksız aşağılık bir sahtekar. İspanya İç Savaşı, Franco rejimi, Nazi Almanya’sı, İspanya’da demokrasiye geçiş gibi konular kitabı canlı tutuyor.
Yücel’in yorumundaki soruları ben de sordum kendime, bazı gel-gitler yaşasam da çok beğendim, soluksuz okudum, kesinlikle öneririm.
Katıksız bir bencillik, cehalet ve şuursuzluk abidesi Marco’nun yalan ve sahtekarlıklarını kitabına alırken kendini de sorgulama hatta özeleştiri yapma gereği duyuyor. Bu bölümler beni çok etkiledi, ikilemde kalmanın ne olduğunu çok güzel betimliyor. Kitabın öyküsünün yakıcılığı edebi yönünün önüne geçiyor olsa da Cercas çok iyi bir yazar, kurgudan da net olarak anlaşılıyor zaten.
Bazen Enric Marco için “iyi niyetli yalancı” noktasına geliyor Cercas. Ama finalinde net olarak ortaya çıktığı gibi katıksız aşağılık bir sahtekar. İspanya İç Savaşı, Franco rejimi, Nazi Almanya’sı, İspanya’da demokrasiye geçiş gibi konular kitabı canlı tutuyor.
Yücel’in yorumundaki soruları ben de sordum kendime, bazı gel-gitler yaşasam da çok beğendim, soluksuz okudum, kesinlikle öneririm.
August 28, 2019
O Χαβιέρ Θέρκας είναι κάτι μεταξύ διανοούμενου και ερευνητή που αγαπάει να γράφει ιστορίες. Το ίσως πιο γνωστό βιβλίο του -τουλάχιστον στην Ελλάδα- είναι Οι Στρατιώτες της Σαλαμίνας, το οποίο μεταφέρθηκε στον κινηματογράφο.
Έχω καταλήξει πως η λατινική λογοτεχνία έχει κάτι που με απωθεί. Είναι η απουσία του χιούμορ και αυτή η τάση προς την θλίψη και την νοσταλγία. Δεν είναι τυχαίο που στην Ελλάδα, σε όλες της τις εκφάνσεις οι λατίνοι έχουν επιτυχία. Τα αστυνομικά τους χτυπάνε στο συναίσθημα, φορτωμένα πολυφορεμένα κλισέ, ενώ τα πιο λογοτεχνιάζοντα βιβλία μιλάνε στην καρδιά του επαναστάτη/αριστερού, καθώς η μοίρα των λατινικών χωρών, και ακόμα περισσότερα της Ισπανίας, βρίσκεται σε μια παράλληλη τροχιά με τα πολιτικά πεπραγμένα της χώρας μας.
Παρόλο που Θέρκας δεν ξεφεύγει από αυτήν την γενική περιγραφή, είναι ένας συγγραφέας που έχω μέσα στην καρδιά μου. Ίσως κατά βάθος να είμαι και εγώ ένας μελαγχολικός Έλληνας με ορμέμφυτη αγάπη στην κλάψα και το σπαραξικάρδια κλισέ. Απεχθάνομαι να παραδεχτώ κάτι τέτοιο, οπότε μάλλον η σύμπνοιά μου με το έργο του έχει να κάνει με τις εξαιρετικές συγγραφικές δεξιότητες του Θέρκας. Έχει αυτή την αβίαστη γραφή, που είναι αξιοζήλευτη, και είμαι σίγουρος πως θα έχει επηρεάσει πολλούς συγκαιρινούς του συγγραφείς.
Ο Απατεώνας δεν είναι από τα καλύτερα βιβλία του. Ασχολείται, όμως, μ' έναν εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέροντα άνθρωπο - ένα παράδειγμα ναρκισσιστή, που φτιάχνει τον μύθο του πάνω στον πόνο θυμάτων του Β΄Παγκοσμίου πολέμου, και όπου τελικά τσακίζεται από την απληστία του-, την ιστορία του οποίου διατυπώνει εξαιρετικά. Το βιβλίο θα μπορούσε να είναι μικρότερο. Το διάβασα τόσο γρήγορα που δεν με πείραξε τελικά.
Έχω καταλήξει πως η λατινική λογοτεχνία έχει κάτι που με απωθεί. Είναι η απουσία του χιούμορ και αυτή η τάση προς την θλίψη και την νοσταλγία. Δεν είναι τυχαίο που στην Ελλάδα, σε όλες της τις εκφάνσεις οι λατίνοι έχουν επιτυχία. Τα αστυνομικά τους χτυπάνε στο συναίσθημα, φορτωμένα πολυφορεμένα κλισέ, ενώ τα πιο λογοτεχνιάζοντα βιβλία μιλάνε στην καρδιά του επαναστάτη/αριστερού, καθώς η μοίρα των λατινικών χωρών, και ακόμα περισσότερα της Ισπανίας, βρίσκεται σε μια παράλληλη τροχιά με τα πολιτικά πεπραγμένα της χώρας μας.
Παρόλο που Θέρκας δεν ξεφεύγει από αυτήν την γενική περιγραφή, είναι ένας συγγραφέας που έχω μέσα στην καρδιά μου. Ίσως κατά βάθος να είμαι και εγώ ένας μελαγχολικός Έλληνας με ορμέμφυτη αγάπη στην κλάψα και το σπαραξικάρδια κλισέ. Απεχθάνομαι να παραδεχτώ κάτι τέτοιο, οπότε μάλλον η σύμπνοιά μου με το έργο του έχει να κάνει με τις εξαιρετικές συγγραφικές δεξιότητες του Θέρκας. Έχει αυτή την αβίαστη γραφή, που είναι αξιοζήλευτη, και είμαι σίγουρος πως θα έχει επηρεάσει πολλούς συγκαιρινούς του συγγραφείς.
Ο Απατεώνας δεν είναι από τα καλύτερα βιβλία του. Ασχολείται, όμως, μ' έναν εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέροντα άνθρωπο - ένα παράδειγμα ναρκισσιστή, που φτιάχνει τον μύθο του πάνω στον πόνο θυμάτων του Β΄Παγκοσμίου πολέμου, και όπου τελικά τσακίζεται από την απληστία του-, την ιστορία του οποίου διατυπώνει εξαιρετικά. Το βιβλίο θα μπορούσε να είναι μικρότερο. Το διάβασα τόσο γρήγορα που δεν με πείραξε τελικά.
May 12, 2018
Enric Marco (n. 1921)
”Eu não queria escrever este livro. Não sabia exatamente por que não queria escrevê-lo, ou sabia mas não queria reconhecê-lo ou não me atrevia a reconhecê-lo; ou não totalmente. O facto é que, ao longo de mais sete anos, resisti a escrever este livro. Durante esse tempo escrevi outros dois, embora não me esquecesse deste; pelo contrário: à minha maneira, enquanto escrevia esses dois livros, também escrevia este. Ou talvez fosse este livro que, à sua maneira, me escrevia a mim.
Os primeiros parágrafos de um livro são sempre os últimos que escrevo. Este livro está terminado. Este parágrafo é o último que escrevo. E, como é o último, já sei por que não queria escrever este livro. Não queria escrevê-lo porque tinha medo. Era isso que sabia desde início mas não queria reconhecê-lo ou não me atrevia a reconhecê-lo; ou não totalmente. O que só agora sei é que o meu medo era justificado.” - assim começa este envolvente romance de não ficção ou romance sem ficção do escritor espanhol Javier Cercas (n. 1962).
Em ”O Impostor” Javier Cercas conta a história de Enric Marco (n. 1921) um octogenário barcelonês que, ao longo de quase três décadas, se fez passar por deportado na Alemanha de Hitler e sobrevivente do campo de concentração nazi de Flossenburg; que presidiu durante três anos a uma grande associação espanhola dos sobreviventes, a Amical de Mauthausen; que deu centenas de conferências e concedeu dezenas de entrevistas; que recebeu importantes distinções oficiais; até que no início de 2005 o historiador Benito Bermejo descobriu que Enric Marco era um impostor.
No entanto, na vida de Enric Marco não há só mentira e falsidade.
Javier Cercas faz um investigação meticulosa recorrendo a várias fontes e vários registos; passou horas, dias, semanas entrevistando Enric Marco; esquadrinha quase um século da história de Espanha, sobretudo, as memórias e os relatos relacionados com a Guerra Civil Espanhola, a especificidade das vivências sociais, económicas e políticas na Catalunha, todo o período da ditadura franquista e a fase de transição para a democracia.
A leitura de ”O Impostor” é fascinante, um thriller enigmático, sobre uma personagem verdadeira e/ou real, com inúmeras verdades e incontáveis mentiras, com relatos contraditórios, entre a realidade e a ficção, uma biografia, um livro ou um romance que resulta sobre a obsessão de um escritor - Javier Cercas - em relação a uma “pessoa” por quem se tem simultaneamente atracção e repulsa.
Nota: a escrita ou estilo que Javier Cercas utiliza, será essencialmente, um registo de transcrição oral. Aplica tal como nos dois parágrafos iniciais citados a figura da repetição - anáfora - que ocorre quando uma mesma palavra ou várias, s��o repetidas sucessivamente. Percebo o intuito da repetição, fundamentalmente, tem o objectivo de dar ênfase e tornar mais expressiva a mensagem. Na minha perspectiva nem sempre a consigo conciliar na vertente da leitura - escrita.
«A realidade mata, a ficção salva.» (Pág. 14)
”A diferença entre Cercas e Marco é que o romancista tem licença para mentir.” (Pág. 22)
http://cadenaser.com/programa/2014/11...
Campo de Concentração Nazi de Flossenburg
August 24, 2018
This is the truth. This is what happened, or what I assume or imagine happened.
Javier Cercas
I am an impostor, but not a fraud.
Enric Marco, after his deception was uncovered
Book 12/13 from the 2018 longlist MBI (book 13 not yet being published), and perhaps my favourite in many respects of them all.
As with fellow shortlistee Munoz Molina this is my 5th Javier Cercas novel - actually strictly 6th since one book was two novellas. My favourite to date had been The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination, and of course his classic Soldados de Salamina. The Speed of Light was also very good although The Tenant And The Motive were both rather lesser works.
And indeed there are strong links to The Anatomy of a Moment, stylistically, in terms of theme (particularly the transition in Spain to democracy) and indeed in the history of how this book came to be written.
The Impostor begins:
I did not want to write this book I did not know exactly why I did not want to write it, but did not want to acknowledge it, or did not dare acknowledge it; or not entirely. During that time I wrote two others, but I never forgot this one; on the contrary: after my fashion, while I was writing those two books, I was also writing this one. Or perhaps, after its fashion, this book was writing me.
a sentence that is rather reminiscent of another highly talented Spanish author called Javier, Javier Marías, and The Impostor shares much of his analytical, circular, deliberately repetitive style.
The reason for Cercas's reluctance in part relates to the story he was to tell:
I met Enric Marco in June 2009, four years after he became the great impostor and the great pariah. Many people still remember his story. Marco was an octogenarian for Barcelona who, for almost three decades had passed himself off as a departado - a deportee - to Hitler’s Germany and a survivor of the Nazi camps, for three years he had been president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the principal Spanish association for survivors of Mauthausen, he had given hundreds of lectures and dozens of interviews, he had received a number of significant official distinctions, and had addressed the Spanish parliament on behalf of his supposed companions in misfortune, until it was discovered in early May 2005 that he had not been deported and had never been a prisoner in a Nazi camp.
Adding to the story Enric Marco - under variations of his names - had also risen to lead a nationwide trade union, again based on deception, then when that crumbled had risen to a senior position in the nationwide association of school parents (here based more on his ability to bluff about his abilities than any reinvention of his past - he did actually have children!), as well as turning out to have children from an earlier marriage completely unknown to his own family.
The unmasking, just days before he was due to give a speech at the Mauthausen concentration camp and in the presence of the Spanish Prime Minister, was at the hands of a relatively obscure historian Benito Bermejo. The BBC take on the story - it was international news - is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europ.... Marco's false claim wasn't that he was in Mauthausen but rather that he was prisoner 6448 in the much lesser known Flossenbürg camp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossen...), but as Benito Bermejo explained in El Pais:
The real inmate 6,448 at Flossenbürg was Enrique Moner Castells, born in Figueras in the year 1900. Enric Marco found that name in the files from the camp and thought that the coincidence between their first names and the first initial of their surnames would allow him to steal his identity.
When Cercas met Marco he had just published The Anatomy of a Moment, in his words a curious book, a strange novel-without-fiction, a rigorously true story, devoid of the slightest trace of invention or imagination, and was initially loathe to write a similar novel-without-fiction again.
There was also the question of whether to tell Marco's story was somehow to justify it. A daughter of one of the actual camp internees, someone who had been taken in by Marco's story, wrote to El Pais to argue against journalists pursuing it:
I do not think we need to understand the reasons for Senor Marco’s deception. To spend time attempting to justify his behaviour is to disparage and fail to understand the legacy of those who were deported.
Cercas was also reminded of Primo Levi's words from If This Is a Man. As Cercas explains: In If This Is a Man, Primo Levi, had written with reference to Auschwitz, or to his experience of Auschwitz, ‘Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify”, which if it didn't stop Levi writing his works certainly added to the guilt he felt as a holocaust survivor and writer.
Later Cercas discovered the commentary on Levi's words by Tzvetan Todorov, the semiologist who also features (albeit more for comic relief) in the MBI longlisted The Seventh Function of Language. Todorov argued that for victims (Cercas argued by extension also the children of victims), understanding relies on some degree of identification and so could be damaging. But that otherwise understanding is a duty: ‘Understanding evil is not to justify it, but the means of preventing it from occurring again.
Two prominent authors also weighed in with their views on Marco at the time of his unmasking. Claudio Magris wrote an article 'The Liar who Tells The Truth' essentially supporting Marco's own line that his stories were true and needed his gift for publicity, even if they strictly didn't happen to him. Cercas has relatively little truck with this arguing that Marco peddled a kitsch version of history (rather like The Life is Beautiful, music from which was often played to accompany his media appearances), although Cercas also dismisses the view that Marco's deception played into the hands of holocaust revisionists, since they need no encouragement in their delusions.
More influentially, not least as he is a friend of Cercas, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an article calling Marco a “monstrous genius”. In Cercas words Vargas Llosa proclaimed that the novelist is a liar who tells the truth and ... claims our man is a brilliant storyteller and welcomes him to the guild. Vargas Llosa also told Cercas personally that Marco is one of your characters! You have to write about him!
Eventually, having completed the "fictional novel" Outlaws, Cercas did return to the project, interviewing Marco and his acquaintances, and researching in archives, and examining his own conscience as to his motivation in writing the story - and this book is the result.
Marco's deceptions began the day he was born - or rather with the date of that day. April 14th 1921, exactly ten years before the proclamation of the Second Republic he proclaimed widely, almost every time he gave a speech or introduced himself: the prosaic truth was that he was born two days earlier on April 12th.
He also claimed to have fought in the Civil War, on the Republican side, indeed decades before his deception with the concentration camp he had used his claimed past as an anarchist and republican to work his way to the top of one of Spain's main trade unions, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), re-legalised after Franco's death.
This was a claim, after his unmasking, most commentators also assumed to be false, as he would have been officially too young to have called up, his accounts of his time were very sketchy, his achievements exaggerated, and there was no evidence. Indeed the historian who unmasked him believed he Marco may even have been an informer for the other side.
But during the novel Cercas eventually finds, to his surprise, documentary proof that Marco was at least in the republican army, even if the kitsch claims for his heroic deeds in historic battles were completely exaggerated, and his claims of clandestine involvement in resistance activities after the Civil War completely fabricated.
When discussing why, if he was there, Marco's account were so lacking in detail, Cercas invokes literature, notably the protagonists in The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace who fought at the battles of Waterloo and Borodino but barely realised what was happening around them; as Tolstoy says he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.
Later Cercas returns to this argument to justify the importance of conventional history alongside the increasing veneration of witnesses memories. Indeed he argues that one of the reasons Marco's deception fell on such fertile ground was this veneration and the historical memory movement (or collective memory as Maurice Halbwachs dubbed it) that took route in Spain around the turn of the millennium.
Marco, he also argues, was far from the exceptional, heroic figure he claimed, but rather guilty of the same mediocrity as everyone else.
Through the years of the Franco regime he continued to side with the vast majority of Spaniards who, willingly or otherwise, meekly accepted the dictatorship and whose deafening silence in no small part explains why it lasted forty years It is that simple. It is that easy. This is no reason to reproach Marco; no-one, as I have said before, is obliged to be a hero.
Another literary comparison that underpins the book is that of Don Quixote, indeed Cercas admits to deluding himself at times that in writing this book he was a Cervantes, hoping to cure the delusions of the imposter and restore him to sanity as Alonso Quixano.
He also sees Marco as a narcissist in what he sees as the truest sense of the term, one who is determined not to know himself, not to recognise himself ... [who] fashions delusions of grandeur and heroism... a fiction capable of hiding his reality. (Had the original novel been published in 2017, as the English translation, rather than 2014, I suspected there would have been a reference to the Narcissist-in-Chief of the US here).
And the reality which Marco needed to hide with the fiction of his heroism:
His prosperity in the 1960s was mirrored by the whole of Spain, a country that, in the midst of the grey, sheep-like silence imposed by Franco’s regime, was beginning to enjoy unprecedented comfort even as it struggled to forget the atrocities and the poverty of the Civil War and the post-war period. It is likely that Marco was also struggling to forget, longing to free himself of the past. Not only the collective past, but also his personal past: the orphaned child, the homeless, libertarian teenager, the solider defeated in war, the broken, disheartened loser, the collaborator with Franco and the Nazis, a prisoner in the German gaol, the unscrupulous salesman, the absent husband and father and the common criminal.
But we know that it is impossible to leave behind the past, that the past is never dead – as Faulkner says – it is merely an aspect of the present. Something that, in the late Sixties or early Seventies, Marco like the rest of the country was beginning to realise.
And as to the suggestion that Marco is in many respects a novelist, Cercas appreciates Vargas Llosa's point, commenting on Marco's novelistic imagination and his creation of a heroic fictional character, but argues he differs in two areas. First that he wished - as in Part II of Don Quixote - to live the lie, to turn the fiction into his reality, to actually become the heroic character in his story, rather than merely write it. And second that:
Unlike great novelists, who in exchange for a factual lie deliver a profound, disturbing, elusive, irreplaceable moral and universal truth, Marco delivers only a sickly, insincere, mawkishness sentimental story that from the historical or moral point of view is pure kitsch, pure lies; unlike Marco great novelists make it possible, through their paradoxical truth fashioned from lies - a truth that does not hide reality but reveals it - to know and recognise the real, to know ourselves and recognise ourselves, to gaze into the reflecting waters of Narcissus without dying.
But Cercas, although he refutes the claim for himself, is, unlike Marco, a great novelist and this is a great novel. 4.5 stars - and it would be a worthy winner of the 2018 Man Booker International.
Credit also is due to the translator Frank Wynne - able to translate French swear words (and little else) in the dreadful Vernon Subutex, 1, and then to translate Cercas's elegant but winding sentences from Spanish.
Javier Cercas
I am an impostor, but not a fraud.
Enric Marco, after his deception was uncovered
Book 12/13 from the 2018 longlist MBI (book 13 not yet being published), and perhaps my favourite in many respects of them all.
As with fellow shortlistee Munoz Molina this is my 5th Javier Cercas novel - actually strictly 6th since one book was two novellas. My favourite to date had been The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination, and of course his classic Soldados de Salamina. The Speed of Light was also very good although The Tenant And The Motive were both rather lesser works.
And indeed there are strong links to The Anatomy of a Moment, stylistically, in terms of theme (particularly the transition in Spain to democracy) and indeed in the history of how this book came to be written.
The Impostor begins:
I did not want to write this book I did not know exactly why I did not want to write it, but did not want to acknowledge it, or did not dare acknowledge it; or not entirely. During that time I wrote two others, but I never forgot this one; on the contrary: after my fashion, while I was writing those two books, I was also writing this one. Or perhaps, after its fashion, this book was writing me.
a sentence that is rather reminiscent of another highly talented Spanish author called Javier, Javier Marías, and The Impostor shares much of his analytical, circular, deliberately repetitive style.
The reason for Cercas's reluctance in part relates to the story he was to tell:
I met Enric Marco in June 2009, four years after he became the great impostor and the great pariah. Many people still remember his story. Marco was an octogenarian for Barcelona who, for almost three decades had passed himself off as a departado - a deportee - to Hitler’s Germany and a survivor of the Nazi camps, for three years he had been president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the principal Spanish association for survivors of Mauthausen, he had given hundreds of lectures and dozens of interviews, he had received a number of significant official distinctions, and had addressed the Spanish parliament on behalf of his supposed companions in misfortune, until it was discovered in early May 2005 that he had not been deported and had never been a prisoner in a Nazi camp.
Adding to the story Enric Marco - under variations of his names - had also risen to lead a nationwide trade union, again based on deception, then when that crumbled had risen to a senior position in the nationwide association of school parents (here based more on his ability to bluff about his abilities than any reinvention of his past - he did actually have children!), as well as turning out to have children from an earlier marriage completely unknown to his own family.
The unmasking, just days before he was due to give a speech at the Mauthausen concentration camp and in the presence of the Spanish Prime Minister, was at the hands of a relatively obscure historian Benito Bermejo. The BBC take on the story - it was international news - is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europ.... Marco's false claim wasn't that he was in Mauthausen but rather that he was prisoner 6448 in the much lesser known Flossenbürg camp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossen...), but as Benito Bermejo explained in El Pais:
The real inmate 6,448 at Flossenbürg was Enrique Moner Castells, born in Figueras in the year 1900. Enric Marco found that name in the files from the camp and thought that the coincidence between their first names and the first initial of their surnames would allow him to steal his identity.
When Cercas met Marco he had just published The Anatomy of a Moment, in his words a curious book, a strange novel-without-fiction, a rigorously true story, devoid of the slightest trace of invention or imagination, and was initially loathe to write a similar novel-without-fiction again.
There was also the question of whether to tell Marco's story was somehow to justify it. A daughter of one of the actual camp internees, someone who had been taken in by Marco's story, wrote to El Pais to argue against journalists pursuing it:
I do not think we need to understand the reasons for Senor Marco’s deception. To spend time attempting to justify his behaviour is to disparage and fail to understand the legacy of those who were deported.
Cercas was also reminded of Primo Levi's words from If This Is a Man. As Cercas explains: In If This Is a Man, Primo Levi, had written with reference to Auschwitz, or to his experience of Auschwitz, ‘Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify”, which if it didn't stop Levi writing his works certainly added to the guilt he felt as a holocaust survivor and writer.
Later Cercas discovered the commentary on Levi's words by Tzvetan Todorov, the semiologist who also features (albeit more for comic relief) in the MBI longlisted The Seventh Function of Language. Todorov argued that for victims (Cercas argued by extension also the children of victims), understanding relies on some degree of identification and so could be damaging. But that otherwise understanding is a duty: ‘Understanding evil is not to justify it, but the means of preventing it from occurring again.
Two prominent authors also weighed in with their views on Marco at the time of his unmasking. Claudio Magris wrote an article 'The Liar who Tells The Truth' essentially supporting Marco's own line that his stories were true and needed his gift for publicity, even if they strictly didn't happen to him. Cercas has relatively little truck with this arguing that Marco peddled a kitsch version of history (rather like The Life is Beautiful, music from which was often played to accompany his media appearances), although Cercas also dismisses the view that Marco's deception played into the hands of holocaust revisionists, since they need no encouragement in their delusions.
More influentially, not least as he is a friend of Cercas, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an article calling Marco a “monstrous genius”. In Cercas words Vargas Llosa proclaimed that the novelist is a liar who tells the truth and ... claims our man is a brilliant storyteller and welcomes him to the guild. Vargas Llosa also told Cercas personally that Marco is one of your characters! You have to write about him!
Eventually, having completed the "fictional novel" Outlaws, Cercas did return to the project, interviewing Marco and his acquaintances, and researching in archives, and examining his own conscience as to his motivation in writing the story - and this book is the result.
Marco's deceptions began the day he was born - or rather with the date of that day. April 14th 1921, exactly ten years before the proclamation of the Second Republic he proclaimed widely, almost every time he gave a speech or introduced himself: the prosaic truth was that he was born two days earlier on April 12th.
He also claimed to have fought in the Civil War, on the Republican side, indeed decades before his deception with the concentration camp he had used his claimed past as an anarchist and republican to work his way to the top of one of Spain's main trade unions, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), re-legalised after Franco's death.
This was a claim, after his unmasking, most commentators also assumed to be false, as he would have been officially too young to have called up, his accounts of his time were very sketchy, his achievements exaggerated, and there was no evidence. Indeed the historian who unmasked him believed he Marco may even have been an informer for the other side.
But during the novel Cercas eventually finds, to his surprise, documentary proof that Marco was at least in the republican army, even if the kitsch claims for his heroic deeds in historic battles were completely exaggerated, and his claims of clandestine involvement in resistance activities after the Civil War completely fabricated.
When discussing why, if he was there, Marco's account were so lacking in detail, Cercas invokes literature, notably the protagonists in The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace who fought at the battles of Waterloo and Borodino but barely realised what was happening around them; as Tolstoy says he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.
Later Cercas returns to this argument to justify the importance of conventional history alongside the increasing veneration of witnesses memories. Indeed he argues that one of the reasons Marco's deception fell on such fertile ground was this veneration and the historical memory movement (or collective memory as Maurice Halbwachs dubbed it) that took route in Spain around the turn of the millennium.
Marco, he also argues, was far from the exceptional, heroic figure he claimed, but rather guilty of the same mediocrity as everyone else.
Through the years of the Franco regime he continued to side with the vast majority of Spaniards who, willingly or otherwise, meekly accepted the dictatorship and whose deafening silence in no small part explains why it lasted forty years It is that simple. It is that easy. This is no reason to reproach Marco; no-one, as I have said before, is obliged to be a hero.
Another literary comparison that underpins the book is that of Don Quixote, indeed Cercas admits to deluding himself at times that in writing this book he was a Cervantes, hoping to cure the delusions of the imposter and restore him to sanity as Alonso Quixano.
He also sees Marco as a narcissist in what he sees as the truest sense of the term, one who is determined not to know himself, not to recognise himself ... [who] fashions delusions of grandeur and heroism... a fiction capable of hiding his reality. (Had the original novel been published in 2017, as the English translation, rather than 2014, I suspected there would have been a reference to the Narcissist-in-Chief of the US here).
And the reality which Marco needed to hide with the fiction of his heroism:
His prosperity in the 1960s was mirrored by the whole of Spain, a country that, in the midst of the grey, sheep-like silence imposed by Franco’s regime, was beginning to enjoy unprecedented comfort even as it struggled to forget the atrocities and the poverty of the Civil War and the post-war period. It is likely that Marco was also struggling to forget, longing to free himself of the past. Not only the collective past, but also his personal past: the orphaned child, the homeless, libertarian teenager, the solider defeated in war, the broken, disheartened loser, the collaborator with Franco and the Nazis, a prisoner in the German gaol, the unscrupulous salesman, the absent husband and father and the common criminal.
But we know that it is impossible to leave behind the past, that the past is never dead – as Faulkner says – it is merely an aspect of the present. Something that, in the late Sixties or early Seventies, Marco like the rest of the country was beginning to realise.
And as to the suggestion that Marco is in many respects a novelist, Cercas appreciates Vargas Llosa's point, commenting on Marco's novelistic imagination and his creation of a heroic fictional character, but argues he differs in two areas. First that he wished - as in Part II of Don Quixote - to live the lie, to turn the fiction into his reality, to actually become the heroic character in his story, rather than merely write it. And second that:
Unlike great novelists, who in exchange for a factual lie deliver a profound, disturbing, elusive, irreplaceable moral and universal truth, Marco delivers only a sickly, insincere, mawkishness sentimental story that from the historical or moral point of view is pure kitsch, pure lies; unlike Marco great novelists make it possible, through their paradoxical truth fashioned from lies - a truth that does not hide reality but reveals it - to know and recognise the real, to know ourselves and recognise ourselves, to gaze into the reflecting waters of Narcissus without dying.
But Cercas, although he refutes the claim for himself, is, unlike Marco, a great novelist and this is a great novel. 4.5 stars - and it would be a worthy winner of the 2018 Man Booker International.
Credit also is due to the translator Frank Wynne - able to translate French swear words (and little else) in the dreadful Vernon Subutex, 1, and then to translate Cercas's elegant but winding sentences from Spanish.
October 26, 2020
Narsist Enric Marco !
Anarşist İşçi !
Franco karşıtı direnişçi !
C.N.T.lideri Enric Marco !
Flosenberg sürgünü !
Mauthausen yöneticisi !
Nazi karşıtı !
Mücadeleci Enric Marco !!
Kitabın yalanla, gerçekle ve bunları ayıran en temel görecelerle olan anlatımı, hangi tarafta olduğunuza ve nasıl baktığınızı merak eden gözleri, üzerinize çevirmiş hissi yaratıyor.
İnsan’ın büyük sorunlarından biri olan yalan ve yalan’ın çizgisinin nerede başlayıp bittiğiyle; gerçeğe ulaşmak için kullanılan her ifadenin, olgu’nun, davranışın ve anlatımın yalan olup olmadığıyla ilgili soruları ve düşünceleriyle bir hesaplaşmaya sokmak istemesi, kitabın en derin ve en temel konusu gibi görünüyor.
Yine kitapta Enric Marco’nun vicdan ve yalan temelinde sorgulanıyor gibi algılanmasının ışığında tarihsel bir grafikle içi içe geçmiş Ahlâk nedir sorusunun toplumlara yansımasını da gördüğümü düşünüyorum. Kitapta ara ara ‘ Marco benim!( biziz ) ‘ çıkışı da bu söylediğimi destekler nitelikte.
Marco’nun tarihsel süreçte romancı olarak ele alınması en dikkatimi çeken kısımlardan biriydi sanırım; kurgusunu, eylemleri ve yaşantısıyla gerçekleştirmiş, gerçeği eğip bükerek tasarımını tamamlamış olması gibi de diyebilirim. Gerçi yukarıdakine zıt bir söylemle yazarın Marco ve yalanlarını Kitsch insan ürünü olarak sayfalarca anlatması, Marco’nun tarih karşısında sahtekâr mı yoksa gerçeğe yorum katarak farklılaştıran biri mi olarak görmemiz konusunda bizi tarafsızlığa iten bir başka kurgu sanırım.
Kitap bana evrensel ahlâk ilkelerini de içeren sorular sordurtmuş olsa da yine de Enric Marco yaşanılan bunca tarihi trajedinin tekrar önümüze serilmiş olması ve bu durumun öyle ya da böyle aktarıcısı olmasından dolayı bu ahlâki durumun 2. Plana düştüğünü gösterir diye düşünüyorum.
Cercas’ın kitabın finaline doğru Marcoyla büyük hesaplaşmaya girdiği; yalancılık ve sahte olmakla alâkalı birbirlerine büyük cümleler kurduğunu görsek de ( ki muhteşem bir hesaplaşmaydı) Cercas’ın asıl fikrinin 400 sayfa boyunca Marco’nun sadece gerçeği eğip bükmekle affedilebilir kılıyor.
Genel anlamda kitabı sevdiğimi söylemeliyim. En başta bahsettiğim ve çok zor olduğunu düşündüğüm biyografik bir kitabı hissettirmeden okumak ve akışını sağlamak alkışlanacak bir durum. Neden bir yıldız eksik verdiğim sorusunun cevabı da sanırım 200 ve 300 sayfa aralığında belgelerle tarihlerle anlatılmak istenen bir dönem vardı, bu kısım fazlasıyla kitabın ritmini düşürdü bu mantıklı olan sebebim diğer mantıksız sebebim ise sanırım artık Hitler Almanyası’nın, Güney Amerika, İspanya gibi ülkelerin iç savaş, darbe, devrim ve gibi söylem kavram ve savlarına zihin olarak doymuş olmanın yılgınlığı diyebilirim.
Saygılar
‘Biz hakikati göstermeye çalışan yalancılarız’ Orson Welles
‘Sanat bir yalandır; gerçeği göstermek için uydurduğumuz.’ Picasso
Anarşist İşçi !
Franco karşıtı direnişçi !
C.N.T.lideri Enric Marco !
Flosenberg sürgünü !
Mauthausen yöneticisi !
Nazi karşıtı !
Mücadeleci Enric Marco !!
Kitabın yalanla, gerçekle ve bunları ayıran en temel görecelerle olan anlatımı, hangi tarafta olduğunuza ve nasıl baktığınızı merak eden gözleri, üzerinize çevirmiş hissi yaratıyor.
İnsan’ın büyük sorunlarından biri olan yalan ve yalan’ın çizgisinin nerede başlayıp bittiğiyle; gerçeğe ulaşmak için kullanılan her ifadenin, olgu’nun, davranışın ve anlatımın yalan olup olmadığıyla ilgili soruları ve düşünceleriyle bir hesaplaşmaya sokmak istemesi, kitabın en derin ve en temel konusu gibi görünüyor.
Yine kitapta Enric Marco’nun vicdan ve yalan temelinde sorgulanıyor gibi algılanmasının ışığında tarihsel bir grafikle içi içe geçmiş Ahlâk nedir sorusunun toplumlara yansımasını da gördüğümü düşünüyorum. Kitapta ara ara ‘ Marco benim!( biziz ) ‘ çıkışı da bu söylediğimi destekler nitelikte.
Marco’nun tarihsel süreçte romancı olarak ele alınması en dikkatimi çeken kısımlardan biriydi sanırım; kurgusunu, eylemleri ve yaşantısıyla gerçekleştirmiş, gerçeği eğip bükerek tasarımını tamamlamış olması gibi de diyebilirim. Gerçi yukarıdakine zıt bir söylemle yazarın Marco ve yalanlarını Kitsch insan ürünü olarak sayfalarca anlatması, Marco’nun tarih karşısında sahtekâr mı yoksa gerçeğe yorum katarak farklılaştıran biri mi olarak görmemiz konusunda bizi tarafsızlığa iten bir başka kurgu sanırım.
Kitap bana evrensel ahlâk ilkelerini de içeren sorular sordurtmuş olsa da yine de Enric Marco yaşanılan bunca tarihi trajedinin tekrar önümüze serilmiş olması ve bu durumun öyle ya da böyle aktarıcısı olmasından dolayı bu ahlâki durumun 2. Plana düştüğünü gösterir diye düşünüyorum.
Cercas’ın kitabın finaline doğru Marcoyla büyük hesaplaşmaya girdiği; yalancılık ve sahte olmakla alâkalı birbirlerine büyük cümleler kurduğunu görsek de ( ki muhteşem bir hesaplaşmaydı) Cercas’ın asıl fikrinin 400 sayfa boyunca Marco’nun sadece gerçeği eğip bükmekle affedilebilir kılıyor.
Genel anlamda kitabı sevdiğimi söylemeliyim. En başta bahsettiğim ve çok zor olduğunu düşündüğüm biyografik bir kitabı hissettirmeden okumak ve akışını sağlamak alkışlanacak bir durum. Neden bir yıldız eksik verdiğim sorusunun cevabı da sanırım 200 ve 300 sayfa aralığında belgelerle tarihlerle anlatılmak istenen bir dönem vardı, bu kısım fazlasıyla kitabın ritmini düşürdü bu mantıklı olan sebebim diğer mantıksız sebebim ise sanırım artık Hitler Almanyası’nın, Güney Amerika, İspanya gibi ülkelerin iç savaş, darbe, devrim ve gibi söylem kavram ve savlarına zihin olarak doymuş olmanın yılgınlığı diyebilirim.
Saygılar
‘Biz hakikati göstermeye çalışan yalancılarız’ Orson Welles
‘Sanat bir yalandır; gerçeği göstermek için uydurduğumuz.’ Picasso
March 26, 2021
Ο απατεώνας είναι ένα πολύ ενδιαφέρον μη μυθοπλαστικό μυθιστόρημα για την πολύκροτη στην Ισπανία υπόθεση ενός ηλικιωμένου που ανέλαβε αξιώματα και αναγνώριση ως επιζών των στρατοπέδων συγκέντρωσης και αγωνιστής κατά του φασισμού για να αποδειχθεί τελικά ότι δεν είχε υπάρξει τίποτα από τα δύο. Ο συγγραφέας επιλέγει να μη διηγηθεί απλά τα γεγονότα αλλά να μας βάλει και στο μυαλό του εκθέτοντας τις σκέψεις και τις αμφιβολίες του για τη συγγραφή του έργου και για μένα τα αποσπάσματα αυτά όπου ασχολείται με το ρόλο του δημιουργού και της τέχνης, τη μνήμη και την κατανόηση του άλλου ήταν τα καλύτερα.
February 18, 2023
Javier Cercas romanla gerçekliği ustaca harmanlayan, kurgu ile kurgu-dışı arasındaki sınırları flulaştırabilen sıkı bir yazar. Salamina Askerleri’nde başarıyla uyguladığı bu yöntemi, bu defa kendini yıllarca bir direnişçi, bir Nazi kampı esiri olarak gösteren, bu sayede büyük bir nam salan, sonra da bu üçkağıdı ortaya çıkan fütursuz ilgi düşkünü Enric Marco’nun hikayesini yazmış. Ama klasik bir sahtekar hikayesi olarak sunmamış, kolaya kaçmamış, çok katmanlı bir tablo oluşturmuş. Özellikle iç savaş, faşizm gibi travmalar yaşamış toplumlarda bireylerin açmazlarına dikkat çekmiş, kolektif hafıza üzerine, geçmişin kaybolmayan yüküne de eğilmiş.
Romanın yazım süreci de bu kitabın ana temalarından; birici şahıs anlatım kullanan Cercas, Marco ile birlikte iki ana karakter. Marco ile yaptığı görüşmeler kitapta ciddi bir yer kaplıyor. Marco’nun hikayesi ile Don Quijote arasında paralellikler kurarak roman sanatına ilişkin düşüncelerini de paylaşmış. Tabii esas konu insan dediğimiz varlığın zafiyetleri ve hırsları.
Zaman zaman biraz uzatıldığı, tekrarlar yapıldığı, fazla ayrıntıya girildiği duygusu uyandırsa da çok ilginç bir kitap Sahtekar. Cercas’ın zaten kendine has, kendisini okutan üslubu değindiğim olumsuzlukları telafi ediyor. Tabii bir de böylesine unutulmaz bir sahtekarın hikayesini okumanın verdiği zevk var. Gökhan Aksay’ın çevirisi de çok iyi.
Romanın yazım süreci de bu kitabın ana temalarından; birici şahıs anlatım kullanan Cercas, Marco ile birlikte iki ana karakter. Marco ile yaptığı görüşmeler kitapta ciddi bir yer kaplıyor. Marco’nun hikayesi ile Don Quijote arasında paralellikler kurarak roman sanatına ilişkin düşüncelerini de paylaşmış. Tabii esas konu insan dediğimiz varlığın zafiyetleri ve hırsları.
Zaman zaman biraz uzatıldığı, tekrarlar yapıldığı, fazla ayrıntıya girildiği duygusu uyandırsa da çok ilginç bir kitap Sahtekar. Cercas’ın zaten kendine has, kendisini okutan üslubu değindiğim olumsuzlukları telafi ediyor. Tabii bir de böylesine unutulmaz bir sahtekarın hikayesini okumanın verdiği zevk var. Gökhan Aksay’ın çevirisi de çok iyi.
March 5, 2016
“Questo non è un romanzo comune bensì un romanzo senza finzione o un racconto reale.” È il tentativo di ricostruire la vera storia di Enric Marco, ambiguo personaggio spagnolo, che per anni si è spacciato per sopravvissuto all'olocausto, attribuendosi le sofferenze reali di un popolo. Smascherato nel 2005, ha attirato su di sé pareri assai discordi. Come e perché scrivere la storia di un impostore? Come cercare di capirne le motivazioni senza giustificarlo? Come riuscire a separare la menzogna così ben costruita dalle verità inconfutabili dette? Non è un compito facile, soprattutto se non si vuole "scendere a patti con il diavolo". Ne nasce un libro interessante, un'indagine puntigliosa, un dialogo continuo con Marco per tentare di estorcergli la verità e mettere a nudo una vita inventata, da quando questi “scoprì che il passato non passa mai o che almeno il suo e quello del suo paese non erano passati, e scoprì che chi domina il passato domina il presente e domina il futuro”. Emerge così la figura di un uomo che si è creato un passato eroico per dimenticare una vita assai poco gloriosa, in un momento in cui in Spagna, nel passaggio da franchismo a democrazia, più o meno tutti gli spagnoli hanno fatto ricorso alla menzogna. Pagina dopo pagina cadono i veli e quello che resta è nulla.
È un'opera ben fatta, ma appesantita da ripetizioni continue che ne rendono a tratti difficile ed esasperante la lettura. Belle le riflessioni sul rapporto tra romanzo e finzione sulla storia spagnola, ancora parecchio controversa e piena di nodi irrisolti.
È un'opera ben fatta, ma appesantita da ripetizioni continue che ne rendono a tratti difficile ed esasperante la lettura. Belle le riflessioni sul rapporto tra romanzo e finzione sulla storia spagnola, ancora parecchio controversa e piena di nodi irrisolti.
June 9, 2018
Πολύ δυνατό, και διδακτικό, μυθιστόρημα/ντοκιμαντέρ για την πολιτεία και τον βίο του λίαν επιτήδειου Ενρίκε Μάρκος (συν πέντε άλλα ονόματα ημιαληθινά και ψεύτικα). Ο Cercas συνθέτει ένα βιβλίο που εστιάζει στο κιτς και στο ψέμα. Διαβάζεται απνευστί, και ξαναδιαβάζεται με χαρακάκι υπογραμμίσεων και πολλά μολύβια. Σπουδαίο έργο!
March 27, 2019
Utterly fascinating book, both as an investigative story and as a psychological profile.
First, I must say, there are definitely times where the author gets lost in the weeds with too much detail about the investigative aspect (thus four instead of five stars), but I thought the quest to understand the main character intriguing.
“Marco lives in a fantasy world, one that’s more interesting and more fun than reality,” the author’s son, Raul, told him, after filming several hours of interviews with Marco.
“Yes,” the father said. “He’s like Don Quixote. And like that character, Marco is hungry for fame and glory, anxious that his exploits should be graven in the memory of the world, eager that men and women should talk about him, love and admire him, consider him an exceptional and heroic individual.”
For three decades, Enric Marco, a Catalan mechanic, was a prominent public face of Spanish survivors of the Holocaust — president of a survivors’ association, the recipient of a number of awards and distinctions. He spoke at Parliament and frequently visited schools, well into his 80s, to tearfully recall his time at the Flossenbürg concentration camp; the torture and killings he witnessed; his eight months of solitary confinement.
Marco was a consummate storyteller, a true fabulist. He made himself the hero of every story, the leading man that every woman wants. He would include made-up details in his stories to make them sound more feasible, such as when describing the sparse utensils in his camp cell, “and a comb, for which I never understood the purpose.” And pretending to hear sea gulls and, somewhat oddly, children playing within earshot of his cell, which he took as signs of hope that he would survive.
In his speeches, Marco declared that a man may be humiliated, brutalized, treated like an animal, yet, in a moment of madness and supreme courage, he can reclaim his dignity, though it should cost him his life, and such moments were within the reach of everyone. He captivated his audiences,, often bringing many to tears. The media ate it up.
But the author, and others investigating Marco’s story, would learn that Marco lied about everything— his name, birth date, war wounds, role in the Resistance against Franco. It was pathological.
"Every great lie is constructed from small truths," the author explains.
For example, Marco had been in Germany during the war, but as part of a voluntary work program established by Franco and Hitler. He was arrested and put in prison as a Communist spy, which he was not, and was eventually released. But he turns this into a long stint in the Flossenbürg concentration camp that would be the basis of his biggest lie yet, a hoax that would lead to his downfall.
If you stake too much on lies, you’re lies will eventually catch up to you.
In 2005, Marco’s personal narrative was unmasked as a hoax by an obscure Spanish historian, Benito Bermejo. In the national uproar that followed, some newspapers called for Marco to take his own life. To pretend to be a concentration camp survivor and, moreover, to use it for his own glory was too much for true survivors.
“After the scandal broke and his deception was unmasked,” the author writes, “he did not acknowledge his mistake, did not stay silent, did not know or recognize himself for who he was, but refused to accept his true identity and actively defended himself in the press, on the radio, on television and on film. He rushed to defend his imaginary I, the heroic I people were trying to kill, and he tried desperately to shore up the existence of this teetering fictional character with elements of his real past.”
William Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It's not even past; it's always part of the present.”
So why did Marco do it? Enric Marco refused to accept Faulkner’s dictum, but worked full time, frenetically, to escape his dark past and be born anew.
To paraphrase the author....
The real Marco was an orphan forcibly removed from his mother, a poor, mentally ill woman, consigned to an asylum, who had been abused by her husband; a boy who experienced a nomadic, loveless childhood; an adolescent inspired by a short-lived revolution and crushed by a horrifying war; a born loser who, at some point in his life, in an attempt to win the love and admiration he had never had, decided to invent his past, to reinvent himself, to rework his life into a glorious fiction that would hide the embarrassing, pedestrian reality.
He proclaimed that he was not who he was— an utterly normal man, a member of the vast, silent, cowardly, grey, depressing majority who always say Yes— but an exceptional person, one of those singular individuals who always says No to evil. Who, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, was an impassioned combatant against fascism; an intrepid anarchist guerrilla operating behind enemy lines during the war and, after the war, the first or one of the first foolhardy resistants to oppose the victorious Franco regime; and as a political exile, a victim of and fighter against the Nazis, a champion of liberty.
So why did Marco not stop with his ruse well into old age? The author says that he was a mediopath, someone who is addicted to the limelight. He could not carry on without commanding constant attention, being the hero. Otherwise his whole world would collapse.
Such personalities are not all that rare. The world has many mediopaths, including politicians, religious leaders and preachers, business people and personal wealth gurus. Odds are, you know at least one mediopath. I do.
------------
The U.S. had its own version of such an impostor, although his "career" was much shorter. Binjamin Wilkomirski wrote a reputed Holocaust memoir "Fragments." Turns out he was a Swiss Gentile named Bruno Doessekker and had not been in any concentration camp.
First, I must say, there are definitely times where the author gets lost in the weeds with too much detail about the investigative aspect (thus four instead of five stars), but I thought the quest to understand the main character intriguing.
“Marco lives in a fantasy world, one that’s more interesting and more fun than reality,” the author’s son, Raul, told him, after filming several hours of interviews with Marco.
“Yes,” the father said. “He’s like Don Quixote. And like that character, Marco is hungry for fame and glory, anxious that his exploits should be graven in the memory of the world, eager that men and women should talk about him, love and admire him, consider him an exceptional and heroic individual.”
For three decades, Enric Marco, a Catalan mechanic, was a prominent public face of Spanish survivors of the Holocaust — president of a survivors’ association, the recipient of a number of awards and distinctions. He spoke at Parliament and frequently visited schools, well into his 80s, to tearfully recall his time at the Flossenbürg concentration camp; the torture and killings he witnessed; his eight months of solitary confinement.
Marco was a consummate storyteller, a true fabulist. He made himself the hero of every story, the leading man that every woman wants. He would include made-up details in his stories to make them sound more feasible, such as when describing the sparse utensils in his camp cell, “and a comb, for which I never understood the purpose.” And pretending to hear sea gulls and, somewhat oddly, children playing within earshot of his cell, which he took as signs of hope that he would survive.
In his speeches, Marco declared that a man may be humiliated, brutalized, treated like an animal, yet, in a moment of madness and supreme courage, he can reclaim his dignity, though it should cost him his life, and such moments were within the reach of everyone. He captivated his audiences,, often bringing many to tears. The media ate it up.
But the author, and others investigating Marco’s story, would learn that Marco lied about everything— his name, birth date, war wounds, role in the Resistance against Franco. It was pathological.
"Every great lie is constructed from small truths," the author explains.
For example, Marco had been in Germany during the war, but as part of a voluntary work program established by Franco and Hitler. He was arrested and put in prison as a Communist spy, which he was not, and was eventually released. But he turns this into a long stint in the Flossenbürg concentration camp that would be the basis of his biggest lie yet, a hoax that would lead to his downfall.
If you stake too much on lies, you’re lies will eventually catch up to you.
In 2005, Marco’s personal narrative was unmasked as a hoax by an obscure Spanish historian, Benito Bermejo. In the national uproar that followed, some newspapers called for Marco to take his own life. To pretend to be a concentration camp survivor and, moreover, to use it for his own glory was too much for true survivors.
“After the scandal broke and his deception was unmasked,” the author writes, “he did not acknowledge his mistake, did not stay silent, did not know or recognize himself for who he was, but refused to accept his true identity and actively defended himself in the press, on the radio, on television and on film. He rushed to defend his imaginary I, the heroic I people were trying to kill, and he tried desperately to shore up the existence of this teetering fictional character with elements of his real past.”
William Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It's not even past; it's always part of the present.”
So why did Marco do it? Enric Marco refused to accept Faulkner’s dictum, but worked full time, frenetically, to escape his dark past and be born anew.
To paraphrase the author....
The real Marco was an orphan forcibly removed from his mother, a poor, mentally ill woman, consigned to an asylum, who had been abused by her husband; a boy who experienced a nomadic, loveless childhood; an adolescent inspired by a short-lived revolution and crushed by a horrifying war; a born loser who, at some point in his life, in an attempt to win the love and admiration he had never had, decided to invent his past, to reinvent himself, to rework his life into a glorious fiction that would hide the embarrassing, pedestrian reality.
He proclaimed that he was not who he was— an utterly normal man, a member of the vast, silent, cowardly, grey, depressing majority who always say Yes— but an exceptional person, one of those singular individuals who always says No to evil. Who, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, was an impassioned combatant against fascism; an intrepid anarchist guerrilla operating behind enemy lines during the war and, after the war, the first or one of the first foolhardy resistants to oppose the victorious Franco regime; and as a political exile, a victim of and fighter against the Nazis, a champion of liberty.
So why did Marco not stop with his ruse well into old age? The author says that he was a mediopath, someone who is addicted to the limelight. He could not carry on without commanding constant attention, being the hero. Otherwise his whole world would collapse.
Such personalities are not all that rare. The world has many mediopaths, including politicians, religious leaders and preachers, business people and personal wealth gurus. Odds are, you know at least one mediopath. I do.
------------
The U.S. had its own version of such an impostor, although his "career" was much shorter. Binjamin Wilkomirski wrote a reputed Holocaust memoir "Fragments." Turns out he was a Swiss Gentile named Bruno Doessekker and had not been in any concentration camp.
March 23, 2018
Sono arrivata a pagina 85 circa e, a questo punto, mi sono detta che innumerevoli altri libri mi attendono e mi sono stancata e che la vita è breve e che può scoppiare la terza guerra mondiale e quindi mi importa poco di seguire le vicende di Enric Marco un ottuagenario di Barcellona (realmente esistito) che per quasi tre decenni: si è fatto passare per attivista nella lotta alla Falange del dittatore Franco, si è detto deportato nella Germania di Hitler, scampato ai campi nazisti, ha presieduto una associazione spagnola di sopravvissuti allo sterminio e, con generosa dovizia di particolari, lo ha raccontato in centinaia di conferenze, interviste con un pathos da vero attore muovendo alle lacrime molti dei suoi ascoltatori mentre in realtà era in larga parte più o meno falso o, quantomeno, drammatizzato o tinto a colori più foschi in un impasto di menzogna e verità.
Mi sono stancata di seguire le farneticazioni di un personaggio esibizionista che ha voluto trasformare la sua vita in una epica gloriosa e, non bastandogli una vita mediocre, se ne è inventata una da eroe dileggiando il mondo intero, senza il rispetto di coloro i quali queste gesta le hanno vissute con verità.
Facendo così oltretutto è stato accusato di essere diventato, suo malgrado, un partigiano del negazionismo perché avendo in parte mentito e per lungo tempo essendo stato creduto nella sua verosimiglianza di racconto si potrebbe ipotizzare che molti altri testimoni, come lui, abbiano voluto distorcere una realtà che sarebbe più edulcorata e mite di quella che la storia ci ha voluto tramandare. La discolpa messa in atto da Enric Marco sta nel fatto che le sue narrazioni, ancorchè non precisamente esatte…, hanno comunque contribuito a sensibilizzare il mondo a non far dimenticare (purchè se ne parli?), a non fare addormentate la memoria collettiva. Magari lo riprendo.
Mi sono stancata di seguire le farneticazioni di un personaggio esibizionista che ha voluto trasformare la sua vita in una epica gloriosa e, non bastandogli una vita mediocre, se ne è inventata una da eroe dileggiando il mondo intero, senza il rispetto di coloro i quali queste gesta le hanno vissute con verità.
Facendo così oltretutto è stato accusato di essere diventato, suo malgrado, un partigiano del negazionismo perché avendo in parte mentito e per lungo tempo essendo stato creduto nella sua verosimiglianza di racconto si potrebbe ipotizzare che molti altri testimoni, come lui, abbiano voluto distorcere una realtà che sarebbe più edulcorata e mite di quella che la storia ci ha voluto tramandare. La discolpa messa in atto da Enric Marco sta nel fatto che le sue narrazioni, ancorchè non precisamente esatte…, hanno comunque contribuito a sensibilizzare il mondo a non far dimenticare (purchè se ne parli?), a non fare addormentate la memoria collettiva. Magari lo riprendo.
January 20, 2015
Se necesita una mirada microscópica para develar a un impostor y más a un impostor inteligente que logró a través de mentiras constituirse.como héroe.
Novela con un final excelso y con un muy buen manejo del lenguaje, sobrescrita por necesidad con datos y más datos. Larga y repetitiva pero buena.
Novela con un final excelso y con un muy buen manejo del lenguaje, sobrescrita por necesidad con datos y más datos. Larga y repetitiva pero buena.
January 11, 2021
Bu kitabı bitirdiğimi görmek isteyen çok arkadaş var, öyle ki başka platformlardan tacize uğruyorum bu konuda *swh. Buyrunuz:
Biraz yalan, biraz da dolan gibi olacağını düşünerek başladığım bu kitap biraz anı, biraz biyografi, biraz da roman.
Cercas bu kitabı oluştururken başından geçenleri, Enric Marco ile nasıl iletişim kurduğunu, söylediklerini (ve zaman içinde bunların nasıl değiştiğini) ve yaptığı başka birkaç görüşmeyi de aktarıyor; anlatılan geçmişin tarihi sahnesini de çiziyor. Tarihe adamımızı ve anlattıklarını koyunca roman oluyor.
Benim İspanya İç Savaşı bilgim zayıftır. Cercas bu kitap bittiğinde kendimi bu konuda daha iyi hissetmemi sağladı. Benzer şekilde (sonradan içimi ağrıtsa da) Flossenbürg’de bir toplama kampı olduğunu ve hatta buradan İspanyolların da geçtiğini öğrenmiş oldum. Burası gerçek bir iyi ki...
Bir araştırmacı olarak bu kitabı nasıl yazdığını, bunu yapmaya nasıl karar verdiğini ve süreçteki ikilemlerini metne yedirmesi Salamina’daki kadar yoğun olmasa da bu iş onun alameti farikasıdır. Eminiz ki bir Cercas okuyoruz.
Peki tüm bu iyi noktalar sahtekârın (dolandırıcının değil) basitçe bize “defalarca okutması” affedilebilir mi?
Yalan üstüne kurulu, yalanın çevresinde dans eden, yalanla yoğurulmuş, yalanı anlatan, yalanı tanımlayan, yalana başvuran, yalanı tartışan bu metin tekil olarak belli bir yalancıya bu kadar odaklanıp yalan hayatını bize ezberletmeli miydi?
“Yalan” ile dildeki daha hafif ve daha ağır anlamlarının çokça zikredileceği bir tartışma olacağa benzer.
(Altı çizili cümleler progresste)
Biraz yalan, biraz da dolan gibi olacağını düşünerek başladığım bu kitap biraz anı, biraz biyografi, biraz da roman.
Cercas bu kitabı oluştururken başından geçenleri, Enric Marco ile nasıl iletişim kurduğunu, söylediklerini (ve zaman içinde bunların nasıl değiştiğini) ve yaptığı başka birkaç görüşmeyi de aktarıyor; anlatılan geçmişin tarihi sahnesini de çiziyor. Tarihe adamımızı ve anlattıklarını koyunca roman oluyor.
Benim İspanya İç Savaşı bilgim zayıftır. Cercas bu kitap bittiğinde kendimi bu konuda daha iyi hissetmemi sağladı. Benzer şekilde (sonradan içimi ağrıtsa da) Flossenbürg’de bir toplama kampı olduğunu ve hatta buradan İspanyolların da geçtiğini öğrenmiş oldum. Burası gerçek bir iyi ki...
Bir araştırmacı olarak bu kitabı nasıl yazdığını, bunu yapmaya nasıl karar verdiğini ve süreçteki ikilemlerini metne yedirmesi Salamina’daki kadar yoğun olmasa da bu iş onun alameti farikasıdır. Eminiz ki bir Cercas okuyoruz.
Peki tüm bu iyi noktalar sahtekârın (dolandırıcının değil) basitçe bize “defalarca okutması” affedilebilir mi?
Yalan üstüne kurulu, yalanın çevresinde dans eden, yalanla yoğurulmuş, yalanı anlatan, yalanı tanımlayan, yalana başvuran, yalanı tartışan bu metin tekil olarak belli bir yalancıya bu kadar odaklanıp yalan hayatını bize ezberletmeli miydi?
“Yalan” ile dildeki daha hafif ve daha ağır anlamlarının çokça zikredileceği bir tartışma olacağa benzer.
(Altı çizili cümleler progresste)
October 12, 2020
Cercas'a, bu müthiş okuma deneyimi için sadece teşekkür ediyorum.Alışık olduğumuz bir Cercas'dan farklı bir Cercas var. Aynı zamanda kitabın karakteriyle kurmaktan kaçındığı zorlu bağlantılarla kurgu ve biyografiyi inanılmaz harmanlamış bir usta. Kitabın detaylandırmasını önümüzdeki günlerde tekrardan yapacağım..
Şimdilik sadece bu kadar.
Keyifli okumalar
Şimdilik sadece bu kadar.
Keyifli okumalar
October 14, 2017
"Perché il passato non passa mai, non è neppure – lo ha detto Faulkner – passato; il passato è soltanto una dimensione del presente."
LA STORIA - "una fantasia lusinghiera, una menzogna dietro cui a volte si camuffa e si ripara, una finzione in grado di nascondere la sua realtà, la sporcizia assoluta della sua vita o ciò che lui percepisce come la sporcizia assoluta della sua vita" -
Nel 2005 Eric Marco, presidente dell'Associazione spagnola di ex- deportati "Amical" viene smascherato dallo storico Benito Barmejio.
Marco, infatti, ha mentito su molte cose e, soprattutto, non è mai stato in un campo di concentramento come invece aveva raccontato a tutti.
Una storia che ben presto crea uno scalpore che varca i confini nazionali bollandolo come il grande impostore, il maledetto.
Si scoprirà ben presto che le menzogne sono molte a partire dalla data di nascita stessa.
Cercas deve quindi districarsi e scavare nel passato per separare il grano dalla gramigna: il reale dalla finzione.
Infanzia infelice, l'esperienza anarchica, la guerra, la Germania...
Un racconto di aneddoti tra il Dice che e quello che invece si legge sulle carte.
Uno scrittore che spoglia l'impostore.
" Lasciami qualcosa" chiederà Marco disperato nel veder sparire sotto gli occhi quell'identità costruita da un'amalgama di bugie e verità.
La realtà è che Marco è sempre stato un uomo della maggioranza.
Una maggioranza spagnola che ha abbassato il capo ed è vissuta nel silenzio acconsentendo al regime dittatoriale fino a che è diventata palese la sua morte. Allora pian piano in molti si sono fatti coraggio ed hanno osato dire i primi no rimaneggiando nei punti più vergognosi la propria storia. Quello che in fondo molti hanno fatto in tutti paese reduci da una dittatura, anche in Italia.
Marco dunque si è unito per l'ennesima volta alla maggioranza, ha seguito il corso della Storia.
La sua grande colpa è stata poi nel esagerare seguendo un impulso narcisistico al limite del patologico. Seguendo un unico mantra: "la realtà uccide e la finzione salva" .
UNO SCRITTORE E LE SUE PAURE -
" Io non volevo scrivere questo libro. Non sapevo esattamente perché non volessi scriverlo, oppure lo sapevo ma non volevo riconoscerlo o non osavo riconoscerlo; o non del tutto. Il fatto è che per più di sette anni mi sono rifiutato di scrivere questo libro. Durante quel periodo ne ho scritti altri due, anche se questo non l’avevo dimenticato; al contrario: a modo mio, mentre scrivevo quei due libri, scrivevo anche questo. O forse era questo libro che a modo suo scriveva me.
I primi paragrafi di un libro sono sempre gli ultimi che scrivo. Questo libro è finito. Questo paragrafo è l’ultimo che scrivo. E siccome è l’ultimo, ormai so perché non volevo scrivere questo libro. Non volevo scriverlo perché avevo paura. È questo che sapevo fin dall’inizio, ma che non volevo riconoscere o che non osavo riconoscere; o non del tutto. Quello che so soltanto adesso è che la mia paura era giustificata."
Questo è l'incipit con cui Cercas presenta due elementi che ripercorreranno nel libro.
In primo luogo un continuo "andamento respingente".
Il timore è quello di doversi fare carico di una storia già condannata e di essere quindi sostanzialmente complice.
Il libro presenta molte ripetizioni soprattutto in merito alle riflessioni etiche e morali che l'autore si pone.
Questo reiterare a me ha dato l'impressione di essere una forma di auto-convincimento di stare facendo la cosa giusta. La sensazione è che ci sia un forte bisogno di giustificare e giustificarsi. In questo modo entra in gioco un secondo elemento di lettura.
Nel momento in cui Cercas dice:
"forse era questo libro che a modo suo scriveva me"
annuncia un lavoro che d'introspezione che lo scrittore e l'uomo hanno dovuto compiere in questa scrittura.
- UN RACCONTO REALE- "è mille volte preferibile una stronzata vera che un enigma fittizio" -
Dunque colui che scrive un racconto di realtà si mette in discussione sia come uomo sia come scrittore.
Un primo e palese rischio sta nel rendersi partecipe della colpa di cui si racconta.
Un esempio celebre citato è quello di Truman Capote che con il capolavoro "A sangue freddoA sangue freddo" si salvò come scrittore ma si condannò come essere umano .
Non è tanto il caso Marco in sé (per cui ho provato una semplice compassione come uomo sofferente per un'infanzia anaffettiva) ciò che ha destato il mio interesse per questo libro ma tutta quella serie d'interrogativi che Cercas si pone e ci pone proprio in merito al suo ruolo come scrittore e di conseguenza al dilemma degli scopi della letteratura.
Lo scrupolo principale è solleticato da quello che Primo Levi ha scritto in "Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo", ossia:
"Forse quanto è accaduto non deve essere capito, nella misura in cui capire significa giustificare"
A ciò Cercas trova una soluzione attraverso le parole di Tzvetan Todorov il quale sosteneva che il rifiuto di capire per i sopravvissuti non solo è lecito ma anche raccomandato per non rischiare l'annichilimento. Per tutti gli altri, invece, la comprensione del male estremo è necessaria per impedirne il ritorno.
Ma le questioni sono molte:
" Può un libro riconciliare un uomo con la realtà e con sé stesso? Può la letteratura salvare qualcuno oppure è impotente e inutile quanto tutto il resto e l’idea che un libro possa salvarci è ridicola e antiquata?".
Cercas tergiversa, tentenna ma alla fine ne esce un NO liberatorio:
"No, soprattutto, alle limitazioni della letteratura, alla sua miserabile impotenza e alla sua inutilità; perché sì, lo penso: se la letteratura serve a salvare un uomo, onore alla letteratura; se la letteratura serve solo come ornamento, ’fanculo alla letteratura. "
LA STORIA - "una fantasia lusinghiera, una menzogna dietro cui a volte si camuffa e si ripara, una finzione in grado di nascondere la sua realtà, la sporcizia assoluta della sua vita o ciò che lui percepisce come la sporcizia assoluta della sua vita" -
Nel 2005 Eric Marco, presidente dell'Associazione spagnola di ex- deportati "Amical" viene smascherato dallo storico Benito Barmejio.
Marco, infatti, ha mentito su molte cose e, soprattutto, non è mai stato in un campo di concentramento come invece aveva raccontato a tutti.
Una storia che ben presto crea uno scalpore che varca i confini nazionali bollandolo come il grande impostore, il maledetto.
Si scoprirà ben presto che le menzogne sono molte a partire dalla data di nascita stessa.
Cercas deve quindi districarsi e scavare nel passato per separare il grano dalla gramigna: il reale dalla finzione.
Infanzia infelice, l'esperienza anarchica, la guerra, la Germania...
Un racconto di aneddoti tra il Dice che e quello che invece si legge sulle carte.
Uno scrittore che spoglia l'impostore.
" Lasciami qualcosa" chiederà Marco disperato nel veder sparire sotto gli occhi quell'identità costruita da un'amalgama di bugie e verità.
La realtà è che Marco è sempre stato un uomo della maggioranza.
Una maggioranza spagnola che ha abbassato il capo ed è vissuta nel silenzio acconsentendo al regime dittatoriale fino a che è diventata palese la sua morte. Allora pian piano in molti si sono fatti coraggio ed hanno osato dire i primi no rimaneggiando nei punti più vergognosi la propria storia. Quello che in fondo molti hanno fatto in tutti paese reduci da una dittatura, anche in Italia.
Marco dunque si è unito per l'ennesima volta alla maggioranza, ha seguito il corso della Storia.
La sua grande colpa è stata poi nel esagerare seguendo un impulso narcisistico al limite del patologico. Seguendo un unico mantra: "la realtà uccide e la finzione salva" .
UNO SCRITTORE E LE SUE PAURE -
" Io non volevo scrivere questo libro. Non sapevo esattamente perché non volessi scriverlo, oppure lo sapevo ma non volevo riconoscerlo o non osavo riconoscerlo; o non del tutto. Il fatto è che per più di sette anni mi sono rifiutato di scrivere questo libro. Durante quel periodo ne ho scritti altri due, anche se questo non l’avevo dimenticato; al contrario: a modo mio, mentre scrivevo quei due libri, scrivevo anche questo. O forse era questo libro che a modo suo scriveva me.
I primi paragrafi di un libro sono sempre gli ultimi che scrivo. Questo libro è finito. Questo paragrafo è l’ultimo che scrivo. E siccome è l’ultimo, ormai so perché non volevo scrivere questo libro. Non volevo scriverlo perché avevo paura. È questo che sapevo fin dall’inizio, ma che non volevo riconoscere o che non osavo riconoscere; o non del tutto. Quello che so soltanto adesso è che la mia paura era giustificata."
Questo è l'incipit con cui Cercas presenta due elementi che ripercorreranno nel libro.
In primo luogo un continuo "andamento respingente".
Il timore è quello di doversi fare carico di una storia già condannata e di essere quindi sostanzialmente complice.
Il libro presenta molte ripetizioni soprattutto in merito alle riflessioni etiche e morali che l'autore si pone.
Questo reiterare a me ha dato l'impressione di essere una forma di auto-convincimento di stare facendo la cosa giusta. La sensazione è che ci sia un forte bisogno di giustificare e giustificarsi. In questo modo entra in gioco un secondo elemento di lettura.
Nel momento in cui Cercas dice:
"forse era questo libro che a modo suo scriveva me"
annuncia un lavoro che d'introspezione che lo scrittore e l'uomo hanno dovuto compiere in questa scrittura.
- UN RACCONTO REALE- "è mille volte preferibile una stronzata vera che un enigma fittizio" -
Dunque colui che scrive un racconto di realtà si mette in discussione sia come uomo sia come scrittore.
Un primo e palese rischio sta nel rendersi partecipe della colpa di cui si racconta.
Un esempio celebre citato è quello di Truman Capote che con il capolavoro "A sangue freddoA sangue freddo" si salvò come scrittore ma si condannò come essere umano .
Non è tanto il caso Marco in sé (per cui ho provato una semplice compassione come uomo sofferente per un'infanzia anaffettiva) ciò che ha destato il mio interesse per questo libro ma tutta quella serie d'interrogativi che Cercas si pone e ci pone proprio in merito al suo ruolo come scrittore e di conseguenza al dilemma degli scopi della letteratura.
Lo scrupolo principale è solleticato da quello che Primo Levi ha scritto in "Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo", ossia:
"Forse quanto è accaduto non deve essere capito, nella misura in cui capire significa giustificare"
A ciò Cercas trova una soluzione attraverso le parole di Tzvetan Todorov il quale sosteneva che il rifiuto di capire per i sopravvissuti non solo è lecito ma anche raccomandato per non rischiare l'annichilimento. Per tutti gli altri, invece, la comprensione del male estremo è necessaria per impedirne il ritorno.
Ma le questioni sono molte:
" Può un libro riconciliare un uomo con la realtà e con sé stesso? Può la letteratura salvare qualcuno oppure è impotente e inutile quanto tutto il resto e l’idea che un libro possa salvarci è ridicola e antiquata?".
Cercas tergiversa, tentenna ma alla fine ne esce un NO liberatorio:
"No, soprattutto, alle limitazioni della letteratura, alla sua miserabile impotenza e alla sua inutilità; perché sì, lo penso: se la letteratura serve a salvare un uomo, onore alla letteratura; se la letteratura serve solo come ornamento, ’fanculo alla letteratura. "
April 20, 2021
Διαβάζοντας ότι πρόκειται περί ενός απατεώνα που ξεγέλασε τους Ισπανούς παριστάνοντας τον επιζώντα των ναζιστικών στρατοπέδων, μου δημιουργήθηκε η απορία εάν άξιζε να γραφτεί ένα τέτοιο πολυσέλιδο βιβλίο. Διαβάζοντας όμως, σκιαγραφώντας την προσωπικότητα του απατεώνα αλλά κυρίως αναλύοντας τη σχέση ιστορίας και μνήμης, μπορώ να μιλήσω για ένα σπουδαίο βιβλίο. Εάν είχε λιγότερη φλυαρία στις τελευταίες του σελίδες και εάν παρέλειπε τον φανταστικό διάλογο του με τον απατεώνα, τότε σίγουρα θα μιλούσαμε για το άριστο βιβλίο.
Ναι πρέπει να διαβαστεί, ειδικά σε τέτοιους χαλεπούς καιρούς όπου ανάμεσα σε ιδεολογικές αψιμαχίες αλλά και σε άγονες ομάδες ανθρώπων, αναφύονται άτομα με τα χαρακτηριστικά του απατεώνα.
Εν κατακλείδι. Ήταν το πρώτο βιβλίο του συγγραφέα και αμέσως μου έχει δημιουργηθεί το ενδιαφέρον ν΄ αγοράσω και τα υπόλοιπά που κυκλοφορούν στην χώρα μας.
Υ.Γ. Ζηλεύω τους Ισπανούς που κατάφεραν να δημιουργήσουν τη δική τους σχολή βιβλίων ιστορικό\ών-πολιτικών θεμάτων....
Ναι πρέπει να διαβαστεί, ειδικά σε τέτοιους χαλεπούς καιρούς όπου ανάμεσα σε ιδεολογικές αψιμαχίες αλλά και σε άγονες ομάδες ανθρώπων, αναφύονται άτομα με τα χαρακτηριστικά του απατεώνα.
Εν κατακλείδι. Ήταν το πρώτο βιβλίο του συγγραφέα και αμέσως μου έχει δημιουργηθεί το ενδιαφέρον ν΄ αγοράσω και τα υπόλοιπά που κυκλοφορούν στην χώρα μας.
Υ.Γ. Ζηλεύω τους Ισπανούς που κατάφεραν να δημιουργήσουν τη δική τους σχολή βιβλίων ιστορικό\ών-πολιτικών θεμάτων....
September 12, 2015
The Spanish literature conceals true jewel. Last year, it was « Confiteor » of Jaume Cabre, a great novel I forgot to review. I don’t speak spanish but this book has just been translated in french. It is a true story. Enric Marco was a star in Spain. President of the Mauthausen deportees association, president of the parents pupils of Catalonia, anarcho-syndicalist, a moral figure in the post-Franco Spain.
All is false. Stupor and scandal in Spain. This book is not a novel stricto sensu. This is also a journalistic work. Cercas met Marco 8 times. But he is a novel. He invented an ideal life to escape the mediocrity from its existence. Jacques Audiard made a film on the same topic « Regarde les hommes tomber ».
In spite of that, Cercas succeeds in writing a true novel, a reflection on the dreamed destinies. After the reading, I do not manage to be in anger against Marco, human too human.
All is false. Stupor and scandal in Spain. This book is not a novel stricto sensu. This is also a journalistic work. Cercas met Marco 8 times. But he is a novel. He invented an ideal life to escape the mediocrity from its existence. Jacques Audiard made a film on the same topic « Regarde les hommes tomber ».
In spite of that, Cercas succeeds in writing a true novel, a reflection on the dreamed destinies. After the reading, I do not manage to be in anger against Marco, human too human.
February 21, 2016
Se mi piacciono i romanzi forse è perché in fondo fondo anche io penso che la realtà uccide e la finzione salva. Questo libro è un romanzo, ma non ha bisogno di una storia inventata: è costruito secondo lo schema che amo di più: la ricerca tramite documenti, testimonianze della storia di quest'uomo che si è inventato una vita, perfetta metafora della storia della Spagna del secolo scorso
August 11, 2018
Διαβάζοντας το οπισθόφυλλο ένιωσα οργή για την απάτη που έστησε ο Ενρικ Μαρκο για τον εκτοπισμό των Ισπανών του Β' Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου. Τελειώνοντας το βιβλίο ένιωσα κατανόηση, τρυφερότητα ίσως και μια συμπάθεια. Και αυτό οφείλεται στη γραφη του Θερκας για την οποία ένιωσα κάτι παραπάνω από συμπάθεια..
November 7, 2020
3.5 stele. O carte de non-fictiune, initial am crezut ca este un roman, o investigatie de tip detectivistic asupra unui personaj adevarat. Scriitura buna, captivanta la inceput, dar la un moment dat devine prea lunga aceasta cautare a adevarului, ideile repetandu-se parca si asta e un pic obositor, in maxim 300 de pagini s-ar fi putut rezuma totul.
January 21, 2015
Mucho libro para tan poco personaje. Por momentos aburrido y repetitivo. Entre novela, reportaje y ensayo, El Impostor no me parece de lo mejor de Cercas.
March 8, 2015
Cercas lo hizo de nuevo. Es el puto amo ( sic)
Shelved as 'dnf'
April 6, 2018DNF at 47%. I am very, very bored by the story and the punctuation is driving me round the bend (an excess of colons and semicolons, a lot of them in the wrong place).
May 29, 2018
El impostor
Enric Marco was born in an insane asylum in 1921. He was raised by an uncle and aunt as the Spanish Civil War was starting. At age 15 he joined the republic forces to fight Franco. He was sent to Germany to work to pay off Franco’s war debt to the Germans. He ended up in a concentration camp but survived to return to his home in Barcelona. After twenty years he becomes a union leader and then becomes the president of Amical de Mauthausen, a Spanish group representing the survivors of concentration camps. He gives talks, visits the camps. He is the “rock star” of historical memory. In 2001 he is awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government. He is the face of the survivors.
But he is an impostor and it��s all lies. In 2005, the historian Benito Bermejo uncovers his deceit. And it all comes crashing down.
Marco is an enigma. Peel away the mask and there is another mask below. He tells so many lies that what is the truth? His story is a novel without fiction.
Enter Javier Cercas. Tempted by one of the filmmakers of the documentary “Ich bin Enric Marco” and prodded on by Mario Vargas Llosa and with access through his sister, he meets, films and records Enric Marco in 2009. With one of the best openings in a book, Cercas states “I did not want to write this book. I don’t know exactly why I did not want to write it, or if I knew it but I did not want to recognize it or dare to recognize it; or none of it.”
Having read two of his other books, “Soldiers of Salamis” and “Anatomy of a Moment” I knew what I was getting into and knew I was in good hands despite his doubts. Reading Cercas for me is a treat; for others not so much. He blends himself into the story, he looks at many sides. He tells the lies; he tells the truth. In one monumental chapter he reveals that Marco symbolizes Spain; all that is wrong with its history.
He challenges the norms, questions everything. For example, Marco was anti-Franco, anti-Nazi and kept telling anyone he had met that we need to remember the past. We must not forget the injustices, the inhumanities. Very good logic. But what happens when we discover that he lied, he made up things. Is he really bad. Are the lies wrong? Cercas argues both sides of telling the truth/telling lies (if your neighbour comes running to you asking to hide from an assassin, would you tell the assassin that you are hiding your neighbour?)
Marco was a narcissist. He wanted to be in the public eye. Sooner or later that vanity will destroy the narcissist. Yet so many people believed him. They propped him up. Are they part of the problem? Are we all part of the problem? But then who do we believe? Heroes? Leaders? Survivors? Liars? Presidents? Hmm....how many of us are gullible? Fake news? Hands up!
I was truly swept away by this book. It reads like a detective story but of a story so good, it really happened. Or so bad, it really happened.
Special thanks to João Carlos and his fine review that triggered me to find this book. Muito obrigado.
Enric Marco was born in an insane asylum in 1921. He was raised by an uncle and aunt as the Spanish Civil War was starting. At age 15 he joined the republic forces to fight Franco. He was sent to Germany to work to pay off Franco’s war debt to the Germans. He ended up in a concentration camp but survived to return to his home in Barcelona. After twenty years he becomes a union leader and then becomes the president of Amical de Mauthausen, a Spanish group representing the survivors of concentration camps. He gives talks, visits the camps. He is the “rock star” of historical memory. In 2001 he is awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government. He is the face of the survivors.
But he is an impostor and it��s all lies. In 2005, the historian Benito Bermejo uncovers his deceit. And it all comes crashing down.
Marco is an enigma. Peel away the mask and there is another mask below. He tells so many lies that what is the truth? His story is a novel without fiction.
Enter Javier Cercas. Tempted by one of the filmmakers of the documentary “Ich bin Enric Marco” and prodded on by Mario Vargas Llosa and with access through his sister, he meets, films and records Enric Marco in 2009. With one of the best openings in a book, Cercas states “I did not want to write this book. I don’t know exactly why I did not want to write it, or if I knew it but I did not want to recognize it or dare to recognize it; or none of it.”
Having read two of his other books, “Soldiers of Salamis” and “Anatomy of a Moment” I knew what I was getting into and knew I was in good hands despite his doubts. Reading Cercas for me is a treat; for others not so much. He blends himself into the story, he looks at many sides. He tells the lies; he tells the truth. In one monumental chapter he reveals that Marco symbolizes Spain; all that is wrong with its history.
He challenges the norms, questions everything. For example, Marco was anti-Franco, anti-Nazi and kept telling anyone he had met that we need to remember the past. We must not forget the injustices, the inhumanities. Very good logic. But what happens when we discover that he lied, he made up things. Is he really bad. Are the lies wrong? Cercas argues both sides of telling the truth/telling lies (if your neighbour comes running to you asking to hide from an assassin, would you tell the assassin that you are hiding your neighbour?)
Marco was a narcissist. He wanted to be in the public eye. Sooner or later that vanity will destroy the narcissist. Yet so many people believed him. They propped him up. Are they part of the problem? Are we all part of the problem? But then who do we believe? Heroes? Leaders? Survivors? Liars? Presidents? Hmm....how many of us are gullible? Fake news? Hands up!
I was truly swept away by this book. It reads like a detective story but of a story so good, it really happened. Or so bad, it really happened.
Special thanks to João Carlos and his fine review that triggered me to find this book. Muito obrigado.
February 19, 2015
Me he cargado el resumen sin querer. Merda podrida!!!!
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