With Miguel Bonnefoy, you often have to know how to distinguish between dream and reality. In September, we went to see him in Toulon, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters. During our lunch at Petit Sud, a restaurant located on the edge of Mourillon beach, the novelist painted us this portrait of his mother: “She is out of the ordinary, she seduces everyone. She is magical, exuberant, extravagant … She only dresses in bright colors, in large scarves When spoken, she mixes Italian, Spanish and French – you have the impression that she speaks Esperanto. expresses herself only in verse, because she is a great reader of poetry. She is an astonishing character, an irresistible being!
A few weeks later, just after receiving the Grand Prix du roman from the French Academy for The Jaguar’s Dreamour man also wins the Femina (unpublished double). We go to the cocktail party at his publisher, Rivages. There, we come across a very small lady dressed in black, who extends her hand to us and introduces herself thus, with an almost Jansenist sobriety: “Good evening sir, I am Miguel’s mother.” It’s hard not to smile when you remember your son’s lyrical flights of fancy about him…
Heir to magical realism, would Bonnefoy have a tendency to embellish? We forgive him, he does it so well. Anyone who has ever spent an evening with him has fallen under the spell of this talkative boy, compared to whom Fabrice Luchini seems extinct, even downright aphasia-ridden. Fortunately for our (bad) comics that Bonnefoy does not launch into the one-man show : he would siphon off their rooms. Rather than considering this reconversion, it is a hit in bookstores. The Jaguar’s Dream has reached 170,000 copies sold, and counting. As in Legacy (winner of the Booksellers Prize in 2021), where he praised his father, a Chilean political refugee, Bonnefoy continues to re-enchant the past of his South American family, this time recounting the incredible destiny of his maternal grandfather, an orphan found in the poor neighborhoods of Maracaibo who will become one of the greatest doctors in Venezuela. Let’s just copy the superb opening of the novel, which gives an idea of the storyteller that Bonnefoy is: “On the third day of his life, Antonio Borjas Romero was abandoned on the steps of a church in a street which today bears his name. “
“Try not to be of your time”
For the purposes of this article, we hoped to catch the writer during one of his visits to Paris. Unfortunately, he has a minister’s agenda (if he were named spokesperson, there is no doubt that the government would be more popular). So we reached him by phone. He’s in a taxi, talking to the driver. Between two sentences addressed to the latter, he answers our questions, like Napoleon who was capable of dictating several letters at the same time to different secretaries. For our part, we are not interested in our route (“Take this way instead!”) or in paying for the trip (“Ah, against all expectations, my credit card goes through!”) but in this anomaly: in our era where only social novels with big subjects (and big clogs) and plaintive autobiographical stories seem to work anymore, how does he manage to achieve such success with his shimmering books which often resemble fables? On the other end of the line, Bonnefoy concentrates for a second: “I remain faithful to a phrase from the painter Roy Lichtenstein: ‘Strive not to be of your time.’ I believe very honestly, and this is not demagoguery, a speech from Miss World, that when a book is sincere, it can touch readers. We see when a novel is sewn with white thread and when it comes out. guts I like pulpy books, those that have flesh. I like books where, when describing a building, there are the words ‘scorpions’ and ‘salamanders’ in the same sentence – that’s what I like. pleases so much. better if the public follows!” When we told you that we are dealing with an original…
Born in Paris in 1986, Bonnefoy grew up in Caracas, Lisbon and Buenos Aires, moving according to the posts to which his mother, a diplomat, was appointed. At the start of his career as a writer, he lived in Rome (resident at the Villa Medici in 2018-2019) then in Berlin before settling in Toulon. Throughout all his travels, he maintained his attachment to our language, learned and cultivated in French high schools abroad during his childhood and adolescence. If he doesn’t have that horrible white writing (in other words, that flat style) typical of our contemporaries, is it because of that? “My books are not better than those of my friends François-Henri Désérable or Nina Léger, I just make my business based on this difference. In the establishments where I was, in Buenos Aires or Lisbon, the Spanish and Portuguese were the languages of the street. French, spoken only in high schools, seemed to me like a language of art, which would not have been touched, soiled, soiled by everyday life, the little rough edges of life. all the local language is clouded by slang, while the French language is purified abroad. The teachers there are its guardians. Recently I was in Bulgaria, invited by the French embassy. was the same: people expressed themselves well, in conversation France was embellished. Distance makes things brighter… It’s a bit like the dead. When we talk about our dead, we always end up making them a little bigger. . Your grandfather, who measured a little 1.70 meters, now measures 2.40 meters! And he was very handsome – truly, what a handsome man! Although not necessarily. But he had incredible charm… You would have seen it, it was incredible: in the street, people applauded him! The dead have that, an aura, and I had this same relationship with French culture and tradition, made of untouchable marble.”
“Deep down, I’m like a footballer”
Olé! When Bonnefoy was launched, there was no stopping him: “What’s funny is that now it’s Spanish that takes this place in my heart. I only find it in books, whereas Spanish French has become a bit commonplace. I have the crazy temptation to write in Spanish, I can’t stop thinking about it: take a pseudonym and start from scratch, by publishing in Spain, then. would be fun!”
In the meantime, he is thinking about a project around which he has been circling for a long time: a book about the utopian republic of Libertalia. To tackle it, you still need to have the time. The bouncing Bonnefoy goes on to trade shows and meetings in bookstores (his publisher refused more than 200 requests). The day we have him on the phone, Bonnefoy has to go speak to the Rueil-Malmaison media library. As we tell him about having done hypokhâgne and khâgne in Rueil, he asks us what the said media library looks like. He was told that he had never set foot there. Falsely outraged amazement of our interlocutor: “Ah, the gentleman knows the local brothel, but not the media library!” On this, he concludes: “Deep down, I’m like a footballer: I take match after match. It’s not the Champions League every night. We have to play in Tours, we have to face Strasbourg.” What a mistake for Real Madrid to have hired the sluggish Kylian Mbappé. The club should have signed Bonnefoy, the flamboyant goleador of our literary scene.
The Jaguar’s Dream. By Miguel Bonnefoy. Shores, 295 p., €20.90.
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