Our exclusive Q&A with Pulitzer and Women's Prize winning author Barbara Kingsolver
We interview the brilliant Barbara Kingsolver about her latest novel Partita.
A&U: You’ve taken us from the Appalachian mountains in Demon Copperhead to the Congo in The Poisonwood Bible. Where does Partita take us?
BK: The novel is set in two places, in two different decades. As an adult, in a time fairly close to the present, the narrator lives on the farmland where she grew up in eastern Tennessee, just a few miles away from the setting of Demon Copperhead. In other words, the Appalachia that is also my home. But half the book is set in 1990, when she was a student in the prestigious Indiana University music school. That’s another place I know well, since I went to college in Indiana and regularly went down the road to Bloomington to hear the free concerts at the Jacobs School of Music. I made a trip back to Bloomington while I was working on the novel, to refresh my memory of the grounds, the surrounding town, and the music buildings. It was very nostalgic.
A&U: Music is woven through the title. What does “Partita” mean in this novel?
BK: A partita is a musical form made up of a series of parts, typically dance movements with different moods: fast, slow, flirtatious, reserved, happy, mournful. (Bach was a fan; he wrote several Partitas.) The musician’s challenge is to bring all the parts together in the performance, so they add up to something that feels whole.
The protagonist of my novel is a classical pianist who has lived through very different things, times that were tragic, joyful, passionate, celebrated, or almost invisibly quiet. The novel begins with a shocking event that forces her to look back on these different parts, trying to see how all they add up. Like a partita, the novel’s chapters have musical titles with different moods, moving back and forth across time, like a musical composition in words. You can enjoy the story without knowing this, but the metaphor builds another level of meaning. The project of literary fiction is to try to make every new book its own unique construction.
A&U: Readers loved the fierce voice of Demon in Demon Copperhead. What can they expect this time?
BK: In the beginning, I was overly conscious of the response to Demon Copperhead, which was an epic, ambitious saga. I wanted to follow it with something that wouldn’t be compared. A small book, I thought, self-contained and intimate. A little love story. A young pianist, falling head over heels for a man who can’t quite understand her feelings for music. But as I looked back on my own experiences of crazy young love, I also saw everything I’ve learned in the decades since. Mature love is so different, tempered with acceptance, loyalty, and forgiveness. I thought it would be a richer novel if I set my little love story inside a bigger, more seasoned one. Then realized I needed to wrap the whole package in an even bigger kind of love, the craving we humans have surely felt since our ancestors first painted a cave wall or raised their voices in song: the eternal human reach for art and beauty. It’s all connected.
A&U: Do readers need a musical background to appreciate Partita? Do you have a musical background yourself?
BK: A reader can easily dive into Partita without knowing classical music, any more than you need to have spent time on whaling ships to enjoy Moby Dick. In both cases, you’ll know more after you’ve finished. Part of the magic of fiction is the way it takes you to places previously unknown. I did ask some self-declared “musical dummies” to read the manuscript, to make sure everything was well-explained and nonboring. I also gave it to professional musician friends to make sure I got the details right.
My own status lies between “dummy” and “pro.” I’ve loved music all my life and played various instruments in everything from marching band to rock bands, but classical piano is my first and lasting love. As a teenager I worked hard enough at it to win a music scholarship to college. I quickly figured out I lacked the single-minded dedication to succeed as a concert pianist, so I took other classes and majored in biology. But I know enough about that world to represent it authentically. One challenge of writing fiction is how much you have to know about the livelihoods of all your characters. We do a lot of research, as well as drawing from our own experience. Luckily for me, I’ve had quite the grab-bag of jobs in my lifetime: housecleaner, artist’s model, hospital orderly, scientist, and more, before I settled down to writing. I’m not sure why it took me ten novels to get to the world of music, but I loved it.
AU: Livia experiences a new world at college while holding on to her roots. How important is setting in shaping a character’s journey?
BK: My characters have to work out all their business in the same world I live in (as I don’t write science fiction), and that world is full of struggles and power imbalances, anywhere you look. Everybody’s carrying some burden, but we all tend to think, as the song says, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” Part of my work is to help people feel seen. We Appalachians, and rural Americans in general, almost never see ourselves on TV or the movies or in books, or even the daily news, except as a corny joke or a condescending poverty piece. We are so much more than that. I see it as my job to represent my place and people, writing about the challenges and beautiful complexities of rural life. Livia is a country girl, daughter of a dairy farmer, who loves classical music with all her heart. She’s not a stereotype; that might surprise some readers. Her story opens the door to questions about class barriers, educational barriers, and also about art: What does it do for us, who gets to make it? At this moment in the United States, rural and urban people seem to be perilously divided over just about everything from politics to what kind of music they claim as their own. Fiction can go deeper, to explore what we have in common.
A&U: Can you talk about the theme of resilience in this book?
BK: The epigraph to Partita is from Toni Morrison: “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.”
That’s an important sentiment for me. I feel so lucky to have seventy years of life experience to bring to work every day. I think readers go to fiction not just looking for entertainment, but for wisdom, and that is a currency that’s mostly earned with age, scar tissue, and the mistakes that we survive. I chose those words from the great Toni Morrison as an epigraph because, beyond the scope of this book, it’s one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard anyone say. It’s a powerful, universal, guiding truth of the human experience. Maybe I wrote this whole novel to prove it.
Partita
by Barbara Kingsolver
The story of a brief, passionate, life-changing love affair, wrapped up in what might be the greatest romance of all: our eternal human longing for art and beauty.
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