Faked books follow long tradition of literary swindles
PARIS (AFP) — Two much touted books exposed as fakes in recent weeks -- a searing US memoir on life with gangs and drugs and a best-seller-turned-movie on the Holocaust-- have rocked the publishing world but are only the latest in an ignominious literary tradition of bogus tales and trumped-up protagonists.
The most recent was revealed on Tuesday by the New York Times about a newly published work the paper itself had not only praised but whose author it had also profiled in a special article.
"Love and Consequences," a memoir about life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in a foster home on the rough side of South Central Los Angeles, was a complete fabrication, it said.
Its author, named as Margaret Jones, turned out to be a pseudonym for a white woman, Margaret Seltzer, 33, who grew up in a well-off section of the California city with her biological parents and a childhood far removed from the drug-running and gang violence recounted in the memoir.
Among the wrenching anecdotes in the book was one that "Jones" had been given her first gun as a birthday present at age 14.
Its publisher, Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group, quickly gave notice on its website that the book was no longer for sale and offered a full refund, upon request, to those who had purchased the work.
The scandal broke as the media, notably in France and Belgium, was still buzzing about another amazing autobiography, "Born with Wolves", about a young Jewish girl whose parents were deported from Brussels by the Nazis during World War II. She then crossed Europe with a wolf pack that supposedly adopted her.
After soaring to best-seller status and morphing into a movie, a Belgian daily exposed the denouement late last month: the tale was fabricated by its 70-year-old author Minique de Wael, who lives in the United States.
"Obviously it's cheating the readers to say it is a true story," the book's French editor, Bernard Fixot, told RTL radio station.
But "Born with Wolves" and "Love and Consequences" are hardly the only pieces of fact-turned fiction.
Consider the case of the "Hitler Diaries", "discovered" by journalist Gerd Heidemann and published in April 1983 by the German news magazine Stern.
The 60 small books, however, were proved later to have been fabricated and both Heidemann and their real author -- notorious German forger Konrad Kujau -- were sentenced to 42 months in prison.
Or the case of French novelist Romain Gary who earned his country's coveted Goncourt prize in 1975 for "La Vie Devant Soi" ("A Life Ahead"), under the pseudonym of Emile Ajar -- without the prize committee knowing about his real appellation.
Another spectacular lie was penned in the United States under the pseudonym of J.T. LeRoy. Depicting an ostensibly true tale of drugs, prostitution and vagrancy in California, the books were snapped up by millions of readers until a 2005 expose revealed J.T. LeRoy was in fact American writer Laura Albert.
The Nazi era and the Holocaust appear particularly fertile territory for fabrication.
In her debut effort "The Hand that Signed the Paper," Australian writer Helen Demidenko recounts the story of two Ukrainian peasants -- her father and her uncle -- who were enrolled in the Waffen-SS before finding refuge in Australia.
The true author turned out to be Jamie Darville, an Australian columnist and writer...whose parents had immigrated from Britain.
Cheaters? Swindlers? Pathological liars? Possible motivations are as numerous and varied as the literary shams themselves.
"This book is a story, it's my story," said "Born With Wolves" author de Wael, who wrote under the assumed name Misha Defonseca.
In an interview with Belgium's Le Soir newspaper, she confessed she was not Jewish, but that her parents had indeed been seized in Brussels and that she had lived with her grandfather and later an uncle.
"It is not my true story but it is my reality, my way of surviving," de Wael told the newspaper, apologising to her readers.
For Philippe Di Folco, author of a 2006 book on literary deceits, the scams sell because there are buyers.
"Let's agree," he said, "we, the readers, sometimes like to be fooled."
