The Appalachia-bred narrator of Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita, is wry, resilient and as forthcoming a companion as you could ask for ... Often relies on tropes...but the tropes work ... Partita has a few sluggish chapters, but they fall in the middle when the author may have been resting up for the heart-hammering final third of the novel ... The book has moments so Thomas-Hardy-sad that you feel like you’ve got rain in your veins.
A hallmark of the decorated novelist’s work is her flair for pithy sentences that illuminate the human experience, giving voice to our private longings and secret vulnerabilities ... Kingsolver brings the full weight of her experience and her other work to the page in this entirely new story. It hits the same chords, but it is full of discovery and insight. She’s different, and we’re different too.
There’s an irony in this prominent liberal writer’s lack of interest in actual politics — in any kind of collective solidarity that might extend beyond the county line. The tendency lends Kingsolver’s work an inescapable feeling of asymmetry ... An unusually sour entry in the Kingsolver canon.
Not all inwardness and insinuation. There is still plenty of Dickensian melodrama ... The novel’s ending...is wonderfully done. Ms. Kingsolver dramatizes it by way of a village recital, turning to music to evoke the feelings that straightforward exposition would heavy-handedly summarize.
To say it’s no Demon Copperhead hardly seems fair. But that’s the unenviable starting point for Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita. One squints to read it in the glaring light of its predecessor ... Kingsolver is, as ever, a teller of tragedies that can bring down the house. But Partita ultimately offers a quieter, more satisfying strain of resolution. It’s a novel about learning to live happily after one’s most cherished dreams are crushed — and realizing that what remains need not be soft-pedaled as a compromise.
A soulful lament of lives interrupted, tricked out with romantic flourishes and op-ed asides before finishing with a surprising last beat of optimism ... In the same way that Partita sits somewhat unfortunately in Demon Copperhead’s shadow, this novel struggles to escape the gravitational pull of the relationship at its core. Too much of the material around it feels supplementary.
Its story is simple, but its resonances complex ... Partita is a musical novel: in its content, its language, its structure and its texture ... Kingsolver is known as an activist writer, but one of the reasons Partita is so interesting is that it doesn’t settle easily into a simple political position ... If at times Partita seems a little neatly sentimental, it arguably earns its cosier moments, after its many striking passages of unsoftened pain and harm; and as a whole, it is a virtuosic performance.
An impassioned testament to the need for art in ordinary communities, and the need for ordinariness in art ... Partita doesn’t offer the immediate satisfactions of Demon Copperhead; it’s a quieter book, slower to get going and to make its world enticing. But it’s a rich novel and one that I’ve found has opened up a dialogue with me as a reader that’s continued long after I finished reading it.
Astute ... The prose is stuffed with imaginative similes and metaphors. Occasionally some are strained...or too obvious ... But this is an enthralling novel, full of pathos, wisdom and humour.
A masterclass in structure and pacing as Kingsolver uses the elements of a partita, a baroque composition made up of a series of contrasting dance movements, to take us back and forwards in time ... Kingsolver has never been one for stripped-back narratives and sparse prose: her novels are full of pulsing, glorious life ... Without question it’s my novel of the year.
Electrifying ... The novel first traps our attention as a romantic, coming-of-age adventure; soon turns shockingly traumatic; then morphs into a gripping family drama; and finally erupts with revelations around deeply concealed secrets. Sections slide back and forth between the younger and older Livia, the transitions wonderfully smooth and effective ... With words alone, Kingsolver conjures an incredible sensory experience; this is the rare book that will satisfy readers of all tastes.
Kingsolver’s profound spiritual novels span generations in sweeping yet intimate ways, layering the literary with the real so that readers can immerse themselves in an intellectualism akin to A. S. Byatt’s and a visceral, embodied world of rawness and feeling ... Brilliant.
Ravishing ... ingsolver presents an enrapturing, brilliantly plotted, deeply personal, and profoundly insightful celebration of the life of the land, the skills and struggles of farmers, and the transcendent power of art to bring us together, make us feel 'more alive,' and make us whole.
The novel lacks momentum compared to Prodigal Summer ...
Still, patient readers will welcome an elegant, mature work reminiscent of Ann Patchett's. And the ending? Perfection. Partita reassures with its promise of second chances.
