Novelist Miguel Bonnefoy's Heritage, translated from the French by Emily Boyce, is a compact yet engaging intergenerational saga that follows one family's triumphs and travails in Santiago de Chile. In the late 1800s, Lazare Lonsonier's father emigrates from France to Chile and launches what becomes a successful wine business in the Andes. But when World War I begins, Lazare takes up the call to defend France, facing nightmarish conditions and impossible moral dilemmas. Lazare, returning to his childhood home on Calle Santo Domingo, marries and perpetuates a family line that includes his aviatrix daughter, Margot, and her radical son, Ilario Da, all of whom must face the impossible decisions and interpersonal struggles of the wars and the internal conflicts to come.
The novel, despite its fast pace and concise length, captures the sweeping and poetic promise of any great family epic. With an evocative attention to detail and an eye for those transcendent moments that link lives across time and space, Bonnefoy (Black Sugar) has a talent for communicating both the minute and grand. Because the novel's well-crafted and emotionally resonant characters take center stage, their lives guide readers through the epic nature of major historical events via the intimate experiences of personal transformation. Though the portrait of intercontinental and generational struggle may be this novel's initial appeal for audiences, it is the mesmerizing and enchanting precision of Bonnefoy's writing--the scent of lemons that haunts Lazare or the sound of bird wings flapping in the aviary of Margot's mother--that will linger with readers. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor