Miguel Bonnefoya 37-year-old Franco-Venezuelan author, won the Femina 2024 prize this Tuesday for his 4e roman, The Jaguar Dream (Shore). Already last week, the novel was crowned with the Grand Prix du Novel of the French Academy, allowing its author to achieve a double which remains rare among the great autumn prizes.
In 2018, Philippe Lançon, for example, obtained the Femina for The flap (Gallimard) and a mention at the Renaudot prize. Last year Kevin Lambert had accumulated the December and Medici prizes for May our joy remain (The New Attila).
Since its publication on August 21, The Jaguar Dream has sold nearly 22,000 copies, according to GFK. Miguel Bonnefoy is the author of around ten works since 2012.
A sensory journey
In this 304-page novel printed in 25,000 copies before publication, Miguel Bonnefoy traces the destiny of three generations caught in the turmoil of the 20th centurye century on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in a flamboyant and devilishly romantic style. In his pre-critique published in Weekly Books, Laëtitia Favro wrote: In a street in Maracaibo, a little girl plays with a wooden truck. She first rolled it through the corridors of her house, then onto the sidewalks and the town’s main square where her mother stopped it, “because she seemed capable of continuing her way to the Brazilian border”. That day, Ana Maria understands that her daughter “would go far in life, but also in the world”. Born on January 23, 1958, the day of the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, she bears the name of her country: Venezuela. A name that will connect her to her roots when, after dreaming of elsewhere and running her fingers over the family atlases, she leaves Maracaibo for Paris, where her son Cristobal will be born.
Born to a Venezuelan mother and a French father, Miguel Bonnefoy takes his reader on a journey between the two continents that constitute him, through stunning family sagas resembling immemorial tales, imbued with the impressions of his childhood between Europe and America Latin. In Black sugar (Rivages, 2017), a Caribbean family saw their existence turned upside down by the legend of a missing treasure. Legacy (Rivages, 2020) retraced the trajectory of uprooted people, from the slopes of the Jura to Santiago de Chile. In The Jaguar’s Dreamthree generations are fulfilling themselves in a path to which their birth did not predestine them. An orphan, Venezuela’s father is abandoned on the steps of a church, in a street that would soon bear the name of an eminent doctor. The name of Antonio Borjas Romero. His.
Faced with “ terrifying minotaur » of the dictatorship
Taken in by a beggar who, worried about seeing him end up as a thug, urges him to work rather than steal, Antonio offers himself as a handyman in a brothel where a swarm of sailors arrives every day. One evening, one of these men pulls from his vest a cigarette rolling machine, similar to the one found in baby Antonio’s diapers. The sailor will return a few weeks later, “African necklaces around the neck” and a letter that would change Antonio’s life. Without her, Antonio would never have attended college or met Ana Maria. “I will only marry the man who will tell me the most beautiful love story”she warns him. Antonio, who knows nothing about love, then sits in the lobby of a bus station, a sign “I listen to love stories” in front of him. He will collect as many as he comes to wonder “if there was a single story in the world that wasn’t about love”.
Confronted with “terrifying minotaur” of the dictatorship, engaged against the regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Antonio and Ana Maria will become great doctors and give birth to a free woman whose story will be written far from her family. “You will only leave when you free yourself from the weight of gold” predicts a clairvoyant in Venezuela. As if melted into the precious metal, Miguel Bonnefoy’s writing invites his reader on a sensory journey where family legends and mythologies mingle with the revolutions of the 20th century.e century. His novel is that of a goldsmith in love with pure romance, giving food for dreams.
Last year, the Femina Prize crowned Neige Sinnopour sad tiger, published by Grasset.
The winners of Femina Étranger et Essai 2024
The Femina Prize jury also awarded:
- Stand your ground, of Paul Audi (Stock) for the Trial category
- Own d’Alia Trabucco Zerán (Robert Laffont, trans. Anne Plantagenet) for the foreign novel category
Last year, Louise Erdrichfor the foreign novel The Sentence (Albin Michel, translated from the American by Sarah Gurcel) et Hugo Micheronfor Anger and Forgetting (Gallimard) in the Essay category, were awarded prizes.
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