{"id":864895,"date":"2026-09-29T16:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T16:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/864895\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T16:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T16:30:11","slug":"book-review-kingsolvers-partita-is-musical-and-haunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/864895\/","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Kingsolver’s ‘Partita’ is musical and haunting"},"content":{"rendered":"

From an early age, the protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s sublime and sensual novel, \u201cPartita<\/a>,\u201d has been a survivor. Livia Bohusz has weathered her mother\u2019s resentment and abuse, her beloved brother\u2019s suicide, life amid an eastern Tennessee farm family shredded by tragedy. What\u2019s sustained Livia is her passion for the piano. At 9, when she could finally reach the instrument\u2019s pedals, she became a church pianist; by 18, a prize-winning virtuoso, studying music on a prodigy\u2019s scholarship at an elite university program in the Midwest. Bach, Ravel, Chopin, Beethoven \u2014 these were the men who preoccupied and obsessed her. When she plays, she \u201chears the melody in my head; then the alto, tenor, and bass lines would unfold themselves like a letter sent from the vibrations in my ears, holding me inside the music.\u201d She has a lover \u2014 a fellow musician \u2014 but it\u2019s her vocation that consumes her.<\/p>\n

One day while walking across campus, she glimpses a man in a red shirt. She is transfixed, and can\u2019t stop thinking about his sinewy arms, \u201cshirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, well-fitting jeans that didn\u2019t sit around thinking for a living \u2014 you couldn\u2019t miss the muscles in the rear view.\u201d Until then, little has distracted Livia from music: \u201cit made no sense, then, to find myself bothered by intrusive thoughts of this handsome stranger.\u201d The next time they meet, he introduces himself as Sigurd, a 26-year-old union organizer. He invites Livia to lunch. Their chemistry is instantaneous. Afterward, she doesn\u2019t remember eating her burger and fries, only that she \u201cstared him down, tongue between my teeth, holding his green eyes with mine. \u2026 Warmth flooded my lower body. I was going over some kind of edge.\u201d In later years, Livia wonders: \u201cDid I recognize the instrument of my destruction?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Up to this point, the novel has unfolded slowly \u2014 a prelude \u2014 more reflection than urgency. Kingsolver, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for \u201cDemon Copperhead<\/a>,\u201d titles the chapter when Sigurd enters Livia\u2019s world \u201cToccata\u201d \u2014 a piece of classical music that requires remarkable finger speed and technique. Here, it also stands for the author\u2019s mastery of her craft, as well as her penchant for vivid similes and metaphors. Livia is normally reserved, but finds that in Sigurd\u2019s company, \u201che drew out confessions like sap from a tree.\u201d Their connection is visceral, sensual, and so is Kingsolver\u2019s language: \u201cSigurd\u2019s green eyes on mine made me feel touched, physically, before he reached across the table and moved his thumb across my cheek.\u201d After their meal, together on the grounds of a nearby cemetery, Livia thinks \u201cOh this. \u2026 Inhaling the scent of tobacco and moss and clean damp granite, my body inhaling his body, believing whatever it wanted to tell me, taking in its nourishment. This is what it feels like to be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kingsolver uses the vocabulary and even the architecture of music to structure the narrative and pace the emotional highs and lows of the story, a lexicon she first acquired as an aspiring concert pianist, like her main character. Sigurd comes to a practice room and tells Livia: \u201cI want to watch you.\u201d While she plays Ravel\u2019s formidable Gaspard de la nuit \u2014 a piano suite she hopes to perfect before a jury of her professors \u2014 Sigurd \u201cwas stroking my shoulders lightly, a perfect legato.\u201d Livia continues to play, and Sigurd to fondle and caress her: \u201cMy lower back arched and my head swam and I wanted to cry out and laugh and throw water on all the windows,\u201d she recalls. Days later, in Sigurd\u2019s bed, Livia observes that \u201cMusic is made of tension. Little tense moments, one after another, each one a building block of tightness or unease that makes your body lean toward something, want it, even long for it, until that yearning is answered with release.\u201d Again and again Livia\u2019s yearning for Sigurd is answered with release; she declares herself \u201clovestruck.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the Livia of before. The Livia of the present is more than 20 years older. She teaches music to high school students in the Tennessee town where she grew up, and vowed to escape. She is married to her childhood friend, Charlie, and theirs is a union not of thunderclaps but of quiet contentment. Kingsolver deftly shifts back and forth in time, allowing this more mature version of her protagonist to consider past events with empathy and wisdom. \u201cYou want too much when you\u2019re young, it\u2019s just what you do,\u201d she muses. <\/p>\n

What happened to Livia after Sigrud left her heartbroken \u2014 what derailed all her plans \u2014 is a mystery that gradually unfolds. That reckoning is prompted by a phone call \u2014 \u201dlike a bomb\u201d \u2014 Livia receives from Sigurd after decades of silence. She\u2019s never told Charlie, or her sister-in-law Mickie, the full story of what nearly broke her, forcing her to leave school and return home. Now his voice triggers a flood of memories. \u201cHow can he still be alive in the atoms of my body?\u201d she asks herself. <\/p>\n

The other event that has recently rocked Livia\u2019s world is the death of her mother, who\u2019s left behind a hoarder\u2019s house filled with \u201cblack trash bags bulging mysteriously \u2026 all of it dusted with shame and the whispering business of mice.\u201d It\u2019s up to Livia to sort through the detritus of a woman so damaged she couldn\u2019t love her daughter, as well as the secrets she\u2019d concealed amid Simplicity patterns, vinyl records, and shoeboxes. <\/p>\n

Livia \u201chated these goblins rising out of the grass, called up by a voice on the phone,\u201d but Sigurd\u2019s reappearance and the breadcrumb trail of clues she discovers within her mother\u2019s house may afford her a chance for a resolution she thought she\u2019d never find. <\/p>\n

The epigraph that opens this powerful, poignant work quotes Toni Morrison: \u201cSometimes you don\u2019t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.\u201d This is Kingsolver\u2019s 11th novel and her most intimate. Like life, \u201cA partita will never be all happy rondos, or all andantes in a minor key.\u201d With this novel, Kingsolver helps us make peace with that.<\/p>\n

PARTITA<\/p>\n

By Barbara Kingsolver<\/p>\n

Harper, 352 pages, $32<\/p>\n

Leigh Haber is a writer, editor, and publishing strategist who for the last 10 years ran Oprah\u2019s Book Club and curated the Reading Room section of O, the Oprah Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From an early age, the protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s sublime and sensual novel, \u201cPartita,\u201d has been a survivor.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":864896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":["post-864895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/864896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}