Decades after Sigurd walked out of her life, Livia picks up the phone and hears him asking if he can visit.
That call opens Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita, and the rest of the novel is Livia working out her reply. A music scholarship was Livia’s ticket to escape the influence of her critical, dissatisfied mother. Then she met Sigurd, a trade unionist and activist, and fell for him completely. When he left her to pursue his path, the life she’d been building fell apart. Now she’s back in the rural county she once escaped, married to a farmer and teaching music locally.
Kingsolver writes about Bach’s music as always asking a question, with an answer that follows. That idea made sense of the title of this novel. Sigurd’s call is the question – will she open herself up to being disrupted all over again?
Livia has a week to answer it, and she spends that time clearing out her hoarder mother’s house. Getting that done mirrors the inner sorting she’s doing at the same time, processing painful memories she has carried for decades.
Livia’s husband Charlie seems a bit bland at first, safe and steady like the boyfriend Sigurd displaced many years ago. By the end of the novel he’s a fully present character. The scene I keep coming back to is Livia and Charlie sitting in two old chairs, watching a bonfire of her mother’s things. Charlie chooses to be there, understanding what this means to her, in spite of the mountains of work waiting for him.
I read Partita after some hard years of my own, and it captures what it feels like to get knocked off course. I follow Barbara Kingsolver wherever she goes in her writing, and her latest is a rewarding, contemplative novel.
