The sex writing threatens to throw the novel off-kilter, but there are rich rewards in this tale of music and middle-aged compromises<\/p>\n
What is the role of art in an artist\u2019s life? Should you commit everything to honing your talent in the hope of becoming a great master? Or should you use your artistic gift to enrich your life and that of your community? In Partita, acclaimed American novelist Barbara Kingsolver grapples with these questions seriously and passionately through the story of a piano prodigy turned music teacher.<\/p>\n
The novel opens in the present, where Livia is a school music teacher in the same part of rural Tennessee where she grew up, married to a farmer who once worked on her father\u2019s farm. Contented middle age has\u00a0been disturbed by a phone call from Sigurd, a\u00a0man\u00a0she had an all-consuming, destructive love affair\u00a0with at college. This pulls her back into her past: both the period of her brother\u2019s suicide when she was 11, and the years when she escaped on a music scholarship to Indiana, convinced she was leaving her parents\u2019 world behind for good. We discover that her dreams of being a world-class pianist were shattered by an accident that damaged her hand, and that Sigurd played a part in this.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/9770c85b3a938a8bbdcdb5f557c8e7bfc2a5fe4f\/460_23_7285_5829\/master\/7285.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=48052ab965054cfd03cf1a6d6951d65e\" "\\"Partita")
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