Many readers with sensitive ears consider Miguel Bonnefoy to be one of the best contemporary prose writers in the French language. Since Octavio’s Journey, Black sugar, Legacy And The inventor (Rivages, 2015 to 2022), the unbridled imagination of this worthy representative of Latin American magical realism is based on phrases that are as musical as they are meticulous.
Perhaps because French is not his mother tongue, he who was born in France in 1986 to a Venezuelan diplomat mother and a Chilean novelist, before growing up between Venezuela and Portugal.
The Jaguar’s Dreamhis fifth novel with the scent ofaguardiente and crude oil, is no exception. The first sentence confirms his status as the spiritual heir of Colombian Gabriel García Márquez: “On the third day of his life, Antonio Borjas Romero was abandoned on the steps of a church on a street that today bears his name.”
Adopted in the second by a mute beggar who passed in front of this church in Maracaibo, Venezuela, the child had in his diapers a cigarette rolling machine. Cigarette seller, handyman in a brothel in the city, then bartender in this “kingdom of loves and misfortunes”, Antonio’s destiny will one day lead the teenager to sit on the benches of the school, where he will meet the beauty who will become his wife, Ana Maria Rodriguez.
She will become the first female doctor in Venezuela, after arriving at the age of 18 in Caracas, the capital, to live with “the niece of a cousin of her grandmother’s first husband”, while he will be a renowned cardiologist. Both idealists and builders. Their only daughter, named Venezuela, will forge another path, on another continent, after meeting a Chilean fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship in Paris.
From the discovery of oil in Maracaibo in 1914 – for almost fifty years, Venezuela would be the world’s leading exporter of black gold – to the years of power of Hugo Chávez, the novelist has nourished his novel with all the myths found “in the black sugar of the Caribbean”, even making certain characters from his other novels appear as shadows.
The Jaguar’s Dream is both the galloping genealogy of the Borjas Romero family and a fabulous panorama of modern Venezuela. From the alleys of Maracaibo to Paris, “this city round like a tear stain”, the very place where Cristóbal, the grandson of Antonio and Ana Maria, a sort of alter ego of the novelist himself, will be born. A spicy result of two continents, two cultures and two languages, a child fascinated by the incredible and delirious stories of the discovery of the New World and for whom writing would later become a “biological necessity”.
There we meet a penguin named Policarpio, countless bandits and adventurers, rebels and shamans from the jungle, revolutionaries, ghosts and dreamers.
Through a telescoped narration that sometimes dazzles us, sometimes stuns us, the novelist nevertheless remains in control of a machine for inventing situations and characters that runs a little cold and remains weak in emotion.