Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel Partita is a beautifully rendered, deeply introspective novel about the myriad ways that life and art can intertwine to create moments both tender and harsh, soothing and chaotic, happy and sad. When we first meet the story’s protagonist Livia Bohusz, she is a middle-aged woman living a modest, peaceful life with her husband Charlie on the farm in Tennessee where they both grew up – until one day, Livia receives a phone call from Sigurd, a man with whom she had a passionate but tumultuous love affair back when she was a 20-year-old piano prodigy studying at a music conservatory in Indiana. Sigurd’s request to see Livia again stirs up traumatic memories of a past filled with loss and resentment that she would rather keep buried. The rest of the story, then, alternates between past and present, with the first-person narrative from Livia’s point of view giving us a front row seat to the trials and tribulations of her life. In many ways, Livia’s experiences parallel the ebbs and flows of the musical compositions that are mentioned throughout the story (there is a list of pivotal pieces at the end of the book, along with page numbers referring back to the relevant scenes), and Kingsolver cleverly titles each chapter with a musical term which I assume has significance to things that happen in the chapter (I’m not a classical music person so I’m not 100% familiar with each term, but I recognized a few of them just from having come across them in other contexts). I especially appreciate the way Kingsolver gives readers intimate insight into Livia’s thoughts and feelings at different stages of her life through the first-person narrative voice. With that said however, I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive initially because stories told in first person can be a hit or miss for me – but Kingsolver proves to be a master at it in this case, as I was completely captivated by Livia telling her own story from the very first page. As a flawed protagonist, Livia could of course be frustrating at times (more than once, I felt like I wanted to shake some sense into her), but even so, I loved that she was portrayed in a nuanced way. In essence, we are given intimate insight into Livia’s thoughts and feelings at different stages of her life, which allows us to witness the evolution of her character as she reflects upon the past in her current present. This is, without a doubt, a character-driven story where the protagonist goes through a lot, but learns and grows from those experiences in the process.
My one complaint about this book would be its ending, which I felt was too abrupt and also didn’t match the emotional intensity of the rest of the story. In addition, it also felt to me that in order to truly appreciate the way that the ending played out, you need to have some familiarity with classical music, whereas I didn’t have that feeling with the rest of the story, even though the entire story is structured liked a musical composition. It is mostly because of the ending (and a few other minor things) that I ultimately rated this one 4.5 stars, despite the fact that, up until the last chapter or so, this was pretty much a 5 star read all the way through.
This is my first Barbara Kingsolver novel and it certainly won’t be my last! I can definitely see why Kingsolver won the Pulitzer Prize (which reminds me that I still need to read her prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead), as the first thing that stood out to me as I was reading Partita is the beautiful, lyrical prose, which honestly blew me away. Kingsolver truly gets at the emotional core of both the character and story with her writing and I’m definitely interested in reading more – luckily, she has a pretty big backlist to explore, which I am absolutely looking forward to!
For those who have read Partita, I recommend also reading this Goodreads interview with Barbara Kingsolver where she talks about the inspiration for the story and also provides some additional context that really enhanced my engagement with the book (though I don’t see any major spoilers, probably best to wait until you’re done reading the book to check out the interview): https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1606.Barbara_Kingsolver?content_type=interviews.
Received ARC from Harper via NetGalley.
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