MIGUEL BONNEFOY FREEFALLS into his strangely alluring new novel, Heritage, which makes a desperate attempt to understand the internal forces that allow one to move forward from a life that is withering. Bonnefoy isn’t bothered by literary restrictions of any kind and seems to be something of a wild spirit accustomed to listening to his own drumbeats. He wanders into the secret in-between places of the human psyche, unafraid of what he might find. That is where he uncovers narrative gold. This novel is loosely based on his family. His Chilean father was tortured by Pinochet and fled to France, where Bonnefoy was raised in a loving home surrounded by books. But it seems the ghosts that haunted his father permeated Bonnefoy’s soul as well, and although he is only thirty-six, he writes with the battered sensitivity of a much older man. His intense third-person narrative voice takes on a wizardlike persona that hypnotizes the reader throughout.
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MIGUEL BONNEFOY FREEFALLS into his strangely alluring new novel, Heritage, which makes a desperate attempt to understand the internal forces that allow one to move forward from a life that is withering. Bonnefoy isn’t bothered by literary restrictions of any kind and seems to be something of a wild spirit accustomed to listening to his own drumbeats. He wanders into the secret in-between places of the human psyche, unafraid of what he might find. That is where he uncovers narrative gold. This novel is loosely based on his family. His Chilean father was tortured by Pinochet and fled to France, where Bonnefoy was raised in a loving home surrounded by books. But it seems the ghosts that haunted his father permeated Bonnefoy’s soul as well, and although he is only thirty-six, he writes with the battered sensitivity of a much older man. His intense third-person narrative voice takes on a wizardlike persona that hypnotizes the reader throughout.