Thanks to three narratives of three very different kinds — a work of literary non-fiction, a documentary film, and an historical novel — I recently came in contact with three accomplished impostors from Catalonia. All three were born in Barcelona between 1912 and 1921, all fought — well, in one case, avoided fighting — on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and all three became historical figures of the 20th Century — well,  in one case, claimed to be such a figure — by means of stunning acts of trickery and deception. 

It’s an interesting idea: not a work of journalism that uses the narrative techniques of fiction, but a novel in which the author has deprived himself of an essential tool, one might say the defining tool of his craft: the license to invent, to make things up, to adjust the details of the narrative world for no other reason than to make the story better. Why restrict himself so?

Of the childhood and youth of Pujol little is known — only what he himself said decades later. There isn’t much reason to doubt his story, except, of course, that he was a liar without peer.