On July 23, 1958, dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez fled by plane from Caracas, driven out by a popular uprising. At the same time, Ana Maria Rodriguez gave birth, to the sound of “Viva Venezuela”, a daughter. “She will be called Venezuela,” said the mother. Two minutes later, barefoot and in rags, the father bursts in. Antonio Borjas Romero has just been released from prison where he was thrown for democratic propaganda.
Ana Maria and Antonio are already very well known. Ana Maria is, if not the first female doctor in the country, the first in Maracaibo, and therefore in the state of Zulia. Antonio is a famous cardiologist and surgeon devoted to serving the poorest. What's more, none of his patients died on his operating table.
A thousand impossible or banal stories
At school, Antonio and Ana Maria competed for the first prize. She demanded to be told “the most beautiful love story”. He gave him a thousand, collected in a notebook from travelers at the bus station. With “The Jaguar's Dream”, Miguel Bonnefoy continues a series of novels begun with “Octavio's Journey”, where the history of his family is intertwined with that of his countries, Venezuela and Chile.
Like his ancestor, he offers us a thousand impossible or banal stories, destinies which intertwine, take shape like sketches where legends drown in the mist only to reappear and come true. Fishermen, adventurers, beggars, madams, magicians or shamans, engineers or torturers, all the people of the great epic cycles are summoned by the storyteller. They pass on half-erased pieces of paper, cigarette rolling machines, gold brooches in the shape of a penguin, all kinds of testimonies, proofs, talismans which make the generous, always inspired pen of Miguel Bonnefoy run wild. .
The dream of the jaguar, by Miguel Bonnefoy, Rivages, 296 pages, 20.90 euros
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