Barbara Kingsolver follows 'Demon Copperhead' with a quieter novel about a broken musical career
'Partita' traces a former piano prodigy turned school teacher as a phone call from the man who derailed her ambitions pulls her back into the past, according to reviews in The New York Times and The Guardian.
Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, 'Partita,' centers on Livia, a music teacher in rural Tennessee married to a farmer who once worked on her father's land, according to The Guardian. Her settled middle age is disrupted by a call from Sigurd, a man with whom she had what the paper describes as an 'all-consuming, destructive' love affair during her college years.
The call sends Livia back through her past, including her brother's suicide when she was eleven and the years she spent on a music scholarship in Indiana, where she believed she had left her family's world behind for good. The Guardian reports that her ambition to become a world-class pianist was ended by an accident that damaged her hand, an accident in which Sigurd played a part. The New York Times' capsule summary describes the book similarly, as a story of a former piano prodigy 'sent reeling into the past' by the same call.
The Guardian frames the novel as an examination of 'the role of art in an artist's life' and whether a gift should be devoted entirely to mastery or used instead to enrich one's own life and community. The review calls 'Partita' a quieter book than 'Demon Copperhead,' Kingsolver's previous novel, and notes that its passages of sex writing risk unbalancing the book, while also finding, in the paper's words, 'rich rewards' in its treatment of music and the compromises of middle age.
No French publication or translation of 'Partita' has been announced in the source material available.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
