Miguel Bonnefoy: "Sometimes fiction ends up being more real than reality."

“His name does not appear in any painting, in any engraving, in any history book,” begins the French-Venezuelan writer Miguel Bonnefoy in his novel El inventor (Libros del Asteroide) about a forgotten pioneer of the 19th century: Augustin Mouchot .

Mouchot was born in France in 1825. The son of a locksmith, he became a professor of mathematics and physics, and, according to Bonnefoy, his biography might have ended there had it not been for a chance encounter with what became the obsession that would define the rest of his life. Mouchot realized that the heat of the sun could be used for revolutionary purposes and, alone, began to design a machine to transform it into energy . Despite the embarrassing failures of the first prototypes, Mouchot persevered until he had the opportunity to demonstrate the workings of his invention in front of Napoleon III.

He successfully exhibited his creation to the public at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, but the crowning moment was short-lived. Climate change was not part of the collective imagination in the age of coal and the steam engine, and Mouchot's device was reduced to a charming curiosity with little useful meaning. Its creator died, blinded by sun exposure and living in poverty.

Bonnefoy is a French writer, the son of a Chilean diplomat and a Venezuelan mother. He studied literature at the Sorbonne and has written several award-winning books , including El viaje de Octavio (2015), Azúcar negro (2017), and Herencia (2020). During his time in Argentina , he presented El inventor at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, performed at the Eterna Cadencia bookstore, and traveled to Rosario to participate in La Noche de las Ideas (The Night of Ideas ). The author spoke with Clarín about his novel.

–How did you come up with the figure of Mouchot?

–It was serendipity, as they say in the scientific world. It was entirely by coincidence and chance. One day I was watching a documentary series on astrophysics, and in one of the episodes, while the host was talking about the various scientists and inventors who had taken an interest in the sun, he suddenly mentioned this Augustin Mouchot and said that at the 1878 World's Fair, this man had been able to make a block of ice using only the power of the sun. And I thought the scene was kind of beautiful and would have definitely made a good chapter in a book. Doing internet searches about him, I realized that Wikipedia had five pages, that no one had written a biography about him, that there were almost no articles. I saw that he was perhaps an interesting character because he had taken an interest in the sun, but he was a very cold man in his personality. An ugly, silent, dull, somewhat withdrawn, sickly man—in other words, everything that is the opposite of the sun. And where there is paradox, where there is contradiction, there is a novel, there is a story.

–Did you want to claim it at some point?

–I admit I didn't see it so much as a book, let's say, a pamphlet, a protest book, or a book committed to ecology, although it is that in some ways. But more in a literary way, interested in the psychological nature of the character, seeing that there was also a bit of a mythological undertone because it makes me think of Icarus, this figure of the man with wings who glues them together with beeswax to escape the labyrinth, and to whom his father tells him, "Don't get too close to the sun because otherwise the wax will become liquid and the wings will come loose, and you'll fall." And he ends up getting too close to the sun and ends up falling, right? And the fall of Icarus in Baudelaire's poems or in Bosch's paintings is a beauty.

–Leaving the ending on the horizon, there's also something mythological about that mix of clairvoyance and blindness, isn't there?

–There's a correlation, and once again we return to the contradiction. Well, on the one hand, he's blind, and on the other, he has a kind of lucidity, like a premonition of what he himself is completely blind. It also makes me think of the figure of Orpheus, for example, who ends his life blind, and, naturally, of Prometheus, who went to steal fire from heaven to bring it to mankind. There's a whole mythological aspect, a bit of the founding stories, that I found very interesting, and that's what I tried to delve into as much as possible.

–Part of your roots are Venezuelan, that is, a country completely associated with oil exploitation. Did that have anything to do with your interest in a renewable energy pioneer?

–Well, that's true. I had already written another book called Black Sugar, where I used a kind of metaphor for the oil curse in Venezuela, given that Venezuelans for a century have tried to dig deep into the soil to become rich in a few months, forgetting about the hardships of agriculture, for example, in the sugarcane fields, since we could have had extraordinary sugar production. I think the idea of ​​making a connection between Mouchot and Venezuelan oil is very nice; I hadn't seen it, to be completely honest. And indeed, there is certainly something to that. I'm part of a world where I'm aware of climate change, and we try to contribute whatever we can, each with our activism, our militancy. This is done in a much more silent and calm manner. However, I repeat, I liked the idea of ​​the character much more.

–This time you're working on a story that's entirely French. What was that challenge like?

–That was also a little crazy. Everything I'd written before was very Caribbean, about Venezuela or the Caribbean in general, or about Chile, since I wrote about my Chilean father, the entire Chilean side of the Bonnefoys in Chile, that this is a crazy 20th-century history of an entire European community that more or less left during the Phylloxera crisis. And I had the feeling that I'd already spent quite a few years and three books talking about Latin America, and it had worn me out a bit. In France, they'd given me that label, and it was a way of saying "I can only write about the Latin world." So, I wanted to prove that I also have a French side, that I know French culture, and that I could write a book about the 19th century, a very Napoleon III book. And I admit it was a beautiful experience, but writing it made me feel super sad because I was far from my literary homeland. I wrote it at a writing residency in Berlin, and I remember being there, and it was raining, cold, and a long winter. And I wrote about Mouchot, this man who wanders around charging his solar machine, blind, dying in solitude, in silence, and in the isolation of poverty. I was very happy to be able to publish the book and return to a much brighter literature, to the Caribbean sun and not to Mouchot's sun.

–The title of the novel, The Inventor , also has to do with the fact that it's a fictionalized biography; you invented part of his story. What does it allow you to tell his life through fiction?

Sometimes fiction ends up being more real than reality, lies end up being more true than truth. And some scenes that never existed, but which condense, which crystallize in their phonetic and semantic core, a kind of symbol or metaphor, a parable, an allegory, suddenly seem to give much more clarity. Reality is more ramified, more incoherent, paradoxically more implausible. For example, the first time he presented his machine to Napoleon III, it was a failed demonstration, and the only information I found in the Paris municipal archives at Pierrefitte in Saint-Denis was a single sentence: "The emperor proposed that I give a demonstration. Unforgiving skies." It's not known exactly what it means; that is, it was probably cloudy. And I had two options: either I'd write the novel as if I were some kind of researcher or historical detective going to the municipal archives, or, on the contrary, I decided to play it more like Stefan Zweig and try, precisely, to imagine the scene, to describe it as it probably could have been. Obviously, I wasn't there, but it's likely something like that happened. It's like a plausible fiction, like a true fiction.

–At one point, Mouchot teams up with Abel Pifre, who was also a real-life figure and is his opposite. How did you conceive of that character?

–If I had tried to imagine him in the novel, my editor would have told me it was too classic, let's say. But yes, indeed, reality shows you that this Abel Pifre really existed and that he was the exact opposite of Mouchot. A young, handsome man, who spoke well, with great distinction, with social skills, and who knew very well how to attract investors, the bankers who could perhaps help Mouchot's machine gain a bigger name, more light. And what's funny is that Abel Pifre ends up buying the patent from Mouchot, which causes Mouchot to end up in obscurity and silence, in misery. Much later, this man meets Otis, who was an American who was making the elevators, and what's funny is that the guy ended up buying the patent from Pifre. So, karma, ended up passing on to Pifre what he had done to Mouchot.

–You portray Mouchot as a very sick and fragile man until he finds the meaning of his life, which he believes justifies his survival. Reading another interview of yours, you said, “I haven't yet written the books I was born to write.” I thought there was a parallel in this belief that there is something that constitutes the purpose of life.

–What a lovely way of looking at it. I hadn't made the connection between the two at all, and yes, there's definitely some of that. The more time passes, the more I'm convinced that my books are incomplete, they're imperfect, that I haven't yet been able to give everything I wanted to give. And I have this humble hope that a book is waiting for me somewhere. I don't know if I'll have time to write it, I don't know if things will fall into place for me, but there's one book that's like the oak book, the cathedral book, when in truth the others are little chapels, churches, altars that you put up. It's crazy to think that some great writers didn't have the cathedral book; they didn't have the time, the theme, the style, the characters, the good publication. Many conditions need to come together for the pharaonic monument of your work to be erected. And that means that all the books before are just sketches and drafts leading up to this one, and the books that follow are pale copies. In other words, García Márquez wouldn't be García Márquez without One Hundred Years of Solitude. He would have been an excellent writer, but he wouldn't have had that pinnacle moment. Many things crystallize there. In fact, Borges says in a beautiful interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano that already in Fervor de Buenos Aires all his obsessions are present like a tuber, like a root concentrated in a kind of black honey. And all the books that came after were merely flowers, ramifications, movements, expansions of this. I like the opposite idea, that is, it's not that everything is in the first books, but that in some final book everything comes together, condensed. I like that idea very much and I would like it to happen to me, but you don't choose that. Universal mathematics chooses it, an invisible algebra.

• Her notable novels include Octavio's Journey (2015), which received various awards such as the Edmée de la Rochefoucauld Prize for debut novels, the Prix de la Vocation, and the Fénéon, and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize for a first novel; Black Sugar (2017; winner of the Mille Pages Prize and the Renaissance Prize); Inheritance (2020, Prix des Libraires 2021 and finalist for the Goncourt and Femina prizes); and The Inventor (2022; Libros del Asteroide, 2023), winner of the Patrimoines Prize and finalist for the Femina prize.

Miguel Bonnefoy presented his work yesterday in Rosario as part of the Night of Ideas, sponsored by Ñ and organized by the Institut français d'Argentine in collaboration with the French Embassy in Argentina, the Alliances Françaises network in Argentina, the Medifé Foundation, and the Franco-Argentine Centers. The event also has the support of the Institut français in Paris, the Novotel Buenos Aires, and municipalities, provinces, and institutions in the seven host cities.