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In 1995, while being interrogated for reasons not yet revealed, Oscar Mandinga spins a colorful yarn about his ancestors and the rustic backwater village they called home: Pata de Puerco, or “Pig’s Foot” in English.
It begins with his great-grandfather and namesake, a pygmy of African heritage. He and his best friend, José, marry sisters, and their lives, and those of others they meet, play out against Cuba’s troubled political backdrop, from violent slave uprisings on a sugar plantation to the Spanish-American War to the Communist revolution and afterward.
The younger Oscar’s tone is rough and sarcastic, and the tales he tells are often exaggerated, but underneath all the bluster are several tender stories of love and family and the gradual unfolding of his heartfelt search for identity. Pata de Puerco may exist solely within Acosta’s rich imagination, but its unique characters and their exploits will long resonate in readers’ minds.
Pig's Foot will be published by Bloomsbury USA next Tuesday, January 14th, in hardcover ($26, 352pp). Bloomsbury published it in the UK last October. Frank Wynne translated it from the original Spanish. This review first appeared in Booklist (11/15/13).
Some additional notes:
(1) While it can definitely be called a historical novel, Pig's Foot also fits with the Latin American tradition of magical realism, which probably will come as no surprise.
(2) There's a twist at the end that readers may find either entirely suitable, given the outlandish nature of a good part of the plot, or unsettling and upsetting. (I was part of the first group.)
(3) At the end of 2013, the author was recognized with a CBE in Queen Elizabeth II's New Year's Honours List for his services to ballet.
You know, sometimes one could almost wish that the Cuban intelligencia had never heard of Gabriel García Marquez. This isn't his fault, of course, that his great books are still the model for Cubans who wish to write who haven't been paying attention to how their nation has been moving on, and that includes in writing fiction too.
ReplyDeleteLove, C.
I see where you're coming from; that aspect of the novel isn't all that original. Although without some of the more wacky happenings and characters, this is a story that could have been pretty depressing - and some aspects of it still are - so I can understand why that technique was used here.
DeletePart of it is that so many of these guys haven't actually lived in Cuba for years, and often hardly lived there at all, having left with their parents when very young.
ReplyDeleteOh, this sounds good! I haven't read anything with magical realism in ages. :)
ReplyDeleteBefore this novel, I hadn't either!
DeleteThat's because what North Americans have labeled magical realism was left behind a long time ago by those from the countries who are supposedly writing it. It's not a cool thing to do to dump all of the writers of the very many nations with their own issues, manners and outlooks into that magical realism box. Not cool at all. Speaking from the pov of listening to Spanish speaker writers talking around the dining table - kitchen table for years now, from the Caribbean to Brasil -- where they don't even speak Spanish! :)
DeleteLove, C..
For what it's worth, the author (Acosta) mentions that Gabriel García Márquez strongly inspired his writing. This work is anchored in Afro-Cuban history - I haven't read other novels that take a wide-scale approach to this topic - but the similarity in technique isn't accidental.
ReplyDeleteThe author left Cuba as a teenager to pursue his career, then returned as an adult to perform with the National Ballet of Cuba. He has a memoir out as well (No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer's Story).
I'm familiar with the fellow! No way anyone in Cuba can't be away of Marquez, as he and Fidel were good friends and Marquez spent so much time in Cuba.
ReplyDeleteBut there are some really interesting fiction and non-fiction writers in Cuba who long ago self-consciously strove to for literary treatments that were more naturally Cuban and of their own times and experiences of them, instead of harking back to the late nineteenth - earlier decades of continental South American strategies. I love Marquez of course -- who cannot? But here we're running into that perennial dilemma, always subject of conferences in the Caribbean on literary, patrimony and cultural identity -- to be our unique selves, not imitating what is done elsewhere. These are fascinating topics in themselves, and when you are in a room of brilliant figures from all over the region, with their brains fizzing and sizzling, one can become seriously giddy!
Love, C.
Love, C.
Is it possible that, in general, grandparents are more powerful figures in Latin American literature than in ours?
ReplyDeleteAnd why?