The novelist Miguel Bonnefoy seizes the destiny of a small professor of mathematics who, in the middle of the XIXe century, the inventor of the first solar engine. A man capable of turning ice into fire, at the heart of an “all coal” era. Meet.
The novelist Miguel Bonnefoy seizes the destiny of a small professor of mathematics who, in the middle of the XIXe century, the inventor of the first solar engine. A man capable of turning ice into fire, at the heart of an “all coal” era.
With The inventor, his fourth novel, the writer brings an idealistic scientist out of obscurity. Faithful to his inimitable way, where each time the tale flirts with the epic, the author of Octavio’s Journey and of black sugar (Rivages, 2015 and 2017) brings Augustin Mouchot (1825-1912), a man in fragile health who wanted to “dig a mine in the sun”, back to life.
From Dijon to colonial Algeria, from learned demonstrations in front of Napoleon III to the Paris of the Universal Exhibition of 1878, with his ardor and his imagination, always a little baroque, Miguel Bonnefoy takes us on the trail of this man to the health fragile who will die at the age of 87 after a slow and spectacular decline.
The writer says he discovered the existence of this forgotten scientist by chance while watching a popular documentary series on astrophysics a few years ago. “Suddenly, like that, the presenter evoked a certain Augustin Mouchot, a man who would have managed to make a piece of ice with the sole force of the sun”, confides Miguel Bonnefoy, caught between two literary meetings at Le Livre on the Place de Nancy, the great salon of the French literary season.
“The image seemed so beautiful to me, he continues, that I became a little more interested in the character. And I realized there was nothing about him, not a novel, not a book, just two shy streets named after him here and there. He who had been the pioneer of solar energy in France. »
Miguel Bonnefoy said to himself that he held a novel in the destiny of this rather cold character who decides to conquer the sun. “There was a very beautiful paradox. And where there is paradox, there is romance,” he says.
A reality that goes beyond fiction
With Mouchot, the novelist had a character who was at the same time shy, sad, austere, rigid and puny, and who tried to “conquer his astral opposite”, light, heat, grandeur. “The world and the star that gives life, while it always seems dead. Subsequently, throughout research in which he tried to reconstruct the existence of this forgotten scientist, he was able to realize that his life was also full of contradictions, stuck between moments of glory and apotheosis and others who are “abominable”.
“And it’s all true!” I said to myself: people won’t believe me, I’m going to have to lie in the novel to be able to be more believable, because reality itself isn’t. »
The subject is light years away from the usual interests of the writer – the Caribbean, the South American heritage – who himself embodies, in a way, the “initial paradox” which is at the heart of his book. “But I find that this character also has something passionate, persevering, tenacious. And it seemed to me that in this kind of sudden desire to launch into a desperate enterprise, there was something almost tropical. Even if it is very Second Empire, very waxed three-piece with a bow tie, there is still something baroque, rococo about it, wanting to conquer the light like that. »
A life that he tells us with a tone of fable, over a telescoped narration, but without ever ignoring the tragic dimension of this destiny. Because the story of Augustin Mouchot is also that of a failure, recalls Miguel Bonnefoy. Mouchot is double forgetfulness. Oblivion during his life and, after his death, oblivion by posterity. Unlike a Tesla, for example, which ended up being rehabilitated.
“In a sense, it is also the story of a bad encounter with the century. It comes at a time when the combustion engine is discovered, when coal deposits are found in the east of France and when the first oil research takes place. »
A circular work
Miguel Bonnefoy ensures that The inventor, like his previous novels, and like others still to come, is at the heart of a deeper and broader narrative architecture. Made up of underground galleries that he launches from book to book, and of “waiting stone”.
“I have, since my first novel, continues Miguel Bonnefoy, a sort of great whole in my head, different books which respond to each other, which create a circularity and have echoes. Each book is independent, but I like this idea of being able to launch threads, here and there, to pick them up later. Moreover, the character of Augustin Mouchot appeared in the last pages ofLegacy (2020), her previous novel.
Born in Paris in 1986 to a Venezuelan diplomat and a Chilean novelist, Miguel Bonnefoy grew up in Venezuela and Portugal. If Spanish is his mother tongue, he did all his schooling in the French network and made the choice to write in the language of Molière.
This may explain the novelist’s singular relationship to language, he whose writing is always precise and sparkling, compact and rigorous. “These are not long books, although the sentence seems pulpy. And it’s really in this balance that I feel good,” he says.
A deliciously frosty, South American side, marked in particular by the taste of certain adjectives, where we can clearly feel the influence of a certain Gabriel García Márquez.
“It’s like religious defectors, recognizes Miguel Bonnefoy. Someone who is not born into a religion ends up being more religious than religious people, knowing better about litanies and rituals, knowing everything about history and theology. For him, it’s the same with language. Those who arrive at a language through another door, which is not that of birth, end up being more intransigent with the language, working it more. To also tell themselves that they have no room for error.
“A bit like class defectors, you see, adds Miguel Bonnefoy. I remember a friend who said this beautiful phrase to me one day: “I’m not rich enough to be badly dressed”. And in a certain sense, I am perhaps not French enough to say bad words…”