At his paternal grandmother’s home in Ibahernando, ca. 1977.  All images courtesy of Javier Cercas.

Javier Cercas rose to literary stardom in Spain with Soldiers of Salamis (2001, translation 2003), a novel about a forgotten incident in the Spanish Civil War. The book is narrated by a struggling novelist and cultural reporter also named Javier Cercas, a grandchild of the war who becomes obsessed with piecing together the story of how Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a Fascist poet and intellectual and one of the founders of the Falange Española, escaped certain death by firing squad and was then spared again by an unknown Republican militiaman. Mario Vargas Llosa praised the book as a return to a “committed literature,” a work that was no less “novelistic, fanciful, and creative” for being about real events; it was an immediate bestseller in Spain and, to date, has sold nearly two million copies worldwide. But the book’s most meaningful impact in Spain was political: it drew attention to the civil war’s legacy, a topic that had been widely avoided by the Spanish people and government for decades, following the pact of forgetting that the left and right made when Franco’s dictatorship fell. Today, Soldiers is credited with indirectly providing the foundation for Spain’s Law of Historical Memory, which has led to the renaming of Spanish streets and squares, the exhumation of the mass graves of victims of Francoist repression, and the restoration of citizenship for the descendants of those who were exiled under the dictatorship.

Cercas is ambivalent about the “memory industry” that he helped foment, preferring to dwell in what he calls the blind spots of history, where the lines between heroism and betrayal, and authenticity and imposture, are less easily adjudicated. The first in a cycle of four novels that complicate Spain’s historical narrative, Soldiers of Salamis was followed by the nonfiction novel The Anatomy of a Moment (2009, 2011), a riveting portrait of the three members of Spanish Parliament who, during the attempted military coup of 1981 in which three hundred and fifty members of the Cortes were held hostage at gunpoint by a rebel faction of the Civil Guard, remained in their seats when asked to surrender; The Impostor (2014, 2017), about Enric Marco, a man from Barcelona who, for decades, falsely claimed he was a survivor of Flossenbürg concentration camp, and became a spokesperson for Spanish victims of Nazism; and Lord of All the Dead (2017, 2019), about Manuel Mena, Cercas’s own great-uncle, who died at nineteen serving in Franco’s army. More recently, he’s taken a foray into detective fiction, writing a series of novels called Terra Alta. Soon after we met, he finished a new book—“the most ambitious and craziest I’ve ever written,” he said—for which he spoke with cardinals and prefects in the Vatican and traveled with the Pope to Mongolia.

In his melding of reportage and archival research with novelistic techniques, Cercas is often compared to the French author Emmanuel Carrère. But where Carrère’s nonfiction narratives merge reporting on contemporary events with high-wire autobiography, Cercas’s books often feature invented narrators, whose creative blocks and marital crises serve to bolster the suspense of their moral examinations of the past. A private man, Cercas avoids literary society, but in recent years he has waged a public battle in his columns for El País against the independence movement of his Catalonian neighbors. He was born in 1962 in Ibahernando, a small village in Extremadura, but he moved to Girona, Catalonia, as a young child. He now lives between Barcelona, where he earned his Ph.D. in Spanish philology, and Verges, a small town in the north of Catalonia, with his wife, the Catalan former actor Mercè Mas.

We spoke this past spring, over the course of three days at his apartment in Barcelona. The living room was sparsely decorated but for a still life of a bowl of fruits painted by a childhood friend and a trove of literary awards haphazardly stashed in a corner. Cercas, who taught literature at the University of Girona for thirteen years, peppers his speech with bons mots and quotes from his favorite writers, and rushes excitedly to offer multiple answers to any question. More than once, he seemed thrilled to have been cornered, and, after venturing a couple of tentative responses, returned the following day with a better answer, having polished it overnight.

INTERVIEWER

Soldiers of Salamis and The Impostor both begin with their narrators in creative crisis. Have you experienced similar moments of block, or doom?

JAVIER CERCAS

I suppose I’d say that, in a way, I’m always in crisis.

INTERVIEWER

That feels like a joke answer, to evade a real one.

CERCAS

I’m being serious. You’re always insecure, always thinking the book you’ve just written will be your last …

But I’ve had two major crises, at least. The most serious was undoubtedly while writing The Anatomy of a Moment. That’s the one I write about in The Impostor.

INTERVIEWER

I remember bumping into you one day around that time, here in Barcelona. You seemed tied up in knots.

CERCAS

It was a brutal time. I don’t want to say too much about it, but suffice it to say I had to go on meds.

INTERVIEWER

Because of the book?

CERCAS

I had a young child, a dying father, and a hundred drafts. In order to figure it out, I had to change genres, change everything. Anatomy began as fiction—I’d intended to write a contemporary take on The Three Musketeers, using the events of the attempted coup of 1981—but it was completely without tension. The problem, of course, was that I was already dealing with a fiction. The coup is like Kennedy’s assassination—everyone has their own personal theory about what happened that day. If you don’t, you’re not a Spaniard.

INTERVIEWER

Damn right.

CERCAS

We’ve all watched that footage a thousand times. For a while, even I believed the theory that the king was implicated in the coup—that it was staged by the intelligence service so that the king could put a stop to it, become the savior of democracy, and consolidate the monarchy. It’s a theory that the far right started floating during the trial, that the far left now upholds, and that, in a literary sense, sounds very appealing, as many conspiracy theories do. And by then it had practically cemented itself as truth in certain books. Well, after I decided that Anatomy had to be a nonfiction novel and started reporting, I spent a week speaking to the secretary-general of the intelligence service at the time of the coup, Lieutenant Colonel Javier Calderón, every afternoon, and to his subordinate, Captain Diego Camacho, every morning, until I realized that the truth was precisely the opposite. What I discovered was that Calderón had actually been one of the few high-ranking officers who’d remained loyal to democracy, and that Camacho, who’d been Calderón’s favorite disciple for some time, had taken revenge for professional reasons and accused him of staging the coup. That doesn’t mean there weren’t members of the secret service who did support the coup, or who went along with it—it was simply the small truth on which the bigger lie was built. Still, many people prefer to stick with tidy, convenient lies, fictions created by unscrupulous journalists on deadline and by authors who’ve written books upon books upon books feeding an industry. All this was fueled by the public imagination and by the coup’s participants themselves—men who seemed to have come straight out of a poem by García Lorca, with mustaches and tricorn hats.