Pig's Foot by Carlos Acosta, review - Telegraph

By Jane Shilling

www.cubacontemporanea.com

In an interview to mark the American publication of his autobiography, No Way Home, the Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta remarked that he didn’t read a book until he was 25. There is presumably not much leisure for reading in the life of an international ballet superstar, but Acosta evidently found a way to make up for lost time, for he cites Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges as inspirations for his first novel, Pig’s Foot.

Acosta’s story is set in the remote hamlet of Pata de Puerco – Pig’s Foot – in the deep south of Cuba, where the ancestors of his narrator, Oscar Mandinga, once lived lives of violence, squalor and high passion. Oscar has never been to Pata de Puerco, but finding himself alone – there are hints that he is detained in solitary confinement – he begins to recall his grandfather’s stories of the extraordinary events that took place in the village.

Oscar’s distant relations, Oscar Kortico and Jose Mandinga, were slaves who rose against their masters to fight in Cuba’s 1868 war of independence. The two fell in love with a pair of sisters and settled in Pata de Puerco, where Oscar’s wife, Malena, died in childbirth and he, inconsolable, died with her. Jose and his wife, Betina, adopted the orphan child, Benicio, the future grandfather of the younger Oscar, raising him as the brother of their own children, Gertrudis and Melecio.

Keep reading on Telegraph >>