In his levitating novels, Miguel Bonnefoy brings to life the founding myths of the Caribbean, whose cosmogony he reconstructs after being decimated by the conquistadors and the oil industry. A writing of the rain, of the mangroves, a flow of liquid words that resonate. “the voices of women and men beyond the depths where they were buried”.
To compose the gesture of Venezuela, a country. “of mangoes and battles”shows a vast romantic petroglyph. A work of witchcraft linked to black magic, which puts old souls in dialogue with those who have not yet been born, since “the first landscape in the world”the lemon trees on the hillside of Octavio’s Journey (Shore, 2015).
Carving his adjectives to give them the shape of a root, he writes vegetal poems sculpted by the mountain, like a brother of the “raw earth, red like papaya”. Between sap and ink, constriction and immensity, the jungle here is an art of writing, of giving back to the homeland what is due to it. Marks in this tropical heat, while his new novel is published, The Jaguar’s Dreamwhere Venezuela takes shape through the intertwined destinies of a couple united like blue macaws, those birds that never separate, and their descendants.
Crossing
Son of a Chilean novelist and a Venezuelan diplomat, Miguel Bonnefoy chose to write in French. He is eager, he told “World of Books”, to draw the “movements of peoples, of families straddling two cultures.” In his intimate and collective epics, he metabolizes the confusing encounter of a character with a country, frustrating the ancestry: it is from a misunderstanding that the lineage ofLegacy (Rivages, 2020) inherits the surname Lonsonier, his hero, Lazare, arrives in Santiago de Chile without speaking the language, explaining that he comes from Lons-le-Saunier…
The work explores the Bracamonte dynasty in tree structure, “beings that came with the wind”, “Legendary brothers of gold seekers and workers”The writer says he had these recurring characters in mind from the beginning. “that would go from one book to another”but also having allowed ourselves to be guided by them over time. “One thingcomment, is to cut down the tree to make a violin. Another is to respect the grain of the wood when carving it.
In The Jaguar’s DreamMigration is also social: Antonio, who is a “A woman who is not her mother is saved from not having one”He became the most famous doctor in Maracaibo, the oil capital of Venezuela, and founded a university. The geographical exiles will be reciprocal: after his daughter, Venezuela, leaves the city to live in Paris, Cristóbal, his son, makes the opposite journey. By marrying a Chilean woman in Paris, Venezuela links the country that bears his name to Chile and France. By leaving his land, we release the ghosts of past generations: on the day of his departure, he releases the spirit of Teresa, who welcomed his father, Antonio, at birth.
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