Montreal Book Fair | The writer’s fable

Meeting Miguel Bonnefoy is a bit like running into an old friend and picking up the conversation exactly where you left off, before being completely caught up in his enthusiasm and sparkling verve. We took advantage of his visit to the Montreal Book Fair to chat with the Franco-Venezuelan writer about his new novel, The Jaguar’s Dreamwhich won over the juries of the Femina Prize and the Académie française this fall.

Then Maalouf: The Jaguar’s Dream is inspired by the story of your grandparents, the famous cardiologist Antonio Borjas Romero, an orphan who grew up in great poverty in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and his wife, Ana Maria Rodriguez, who was the first female doctor in his native region. But you took certain liberties for the purposes of the novel…

Miguel Bonnefoy: The idea was to find the right distance to be both close to this family mythology, this legend, this fable, but far enough away to be able to be tempted by fiction, recreate certain things, modify, eliminate a character, add another, rebalance, confront forces and say to yourself: there you go, I’m writing a novel, but it’s not a family hagiography. […] My aunt, for example, does not appear in the book even though she is a fundamental and essential character in my life. His story is beautiful and tragic and could make for a whole book. […] My grandfather and grandmother separated when they were around 50, but I wanted to ensure that in the book, their love story lasted until the end. That means that in two generations, my daughters will only remember a very beautiful love story in their family mythology. […] My mother, when finishing the book, was moved to tears because she said to me: “You wrote the story that I would have wanted to live. »

The Jaguar’s Dream won two prestigious literary awards. What do these awards mean for your writing career?

It’s as if we gave you more wind to make your mill run better, more fertilizer to make your plants grow better. Literary prizes allow you to lean on yourself so that you can move forward better and have time to write a book that is perhaps more extensive, bigger, more daring, more daring. And that’s exactly what I want to do now. I am waiting for the storm to pass, this whirlwind of meetings, interviews, travels, to return to what I really am, that is to say a copyist monk who, at home, in silence and solitude , try to make something out of nothing.

You were born in Paris to a Venezuelan mother and a Chilean father, and you traveled a lot due to the work of your mother, who was a diplomat. Where do you feel at home?

In a bookstore [rires]…or in a library. Anywhere. Now, I live in Toulon, even though I have no ties to Toulon. I know that I will not live there all my life, that at any moment I will move again and that I will live in other countries, probably in other languages. And it’s very likely, in fact, that I’ll continue to do that for the rest of my life, because that’s what I enjoy. It’s like a virus that you have inside you because your parents passed it on to you, because they were travelers. And when I examine my family history – probably like anyone’s – I realize that I repeat family patterns, either of sedentary life or patterns of migration. And for me, in my family, there are only migrants; either exiles for political reasons, or self-exiles, or just a taste for travel, but constantly on both sides, there is only that: the movement, the journey. I’m inevitably just repeating.

Your father was also a novelist. Was it he who passed on his passion for writing to you?

My father always wrote books and my mother was cultural attaché of the Venezuelan embassy in different countries. So I always grew up there. I was immersed in books and I knew I wanted to write since I was a teenager. For 13, 14, 15 years, I had this fascination for writing, for writers, I was a very big reader. That’s what I’ve always liked.

Does your family mythology continue to inform your writing?

There are still a thousand stories to tell. There are characters that I came close to, but that I could develop tomorrow… a bit like the Americans do with their spin-off [rires].

Miguel Bonnefoy is signing until Sunday at the Salon. A major interview is also planned for Saturday, from 4:15 p.m. to 5 p.m.

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