Inside a Jar of Time: Playing the Past in Barbara Kingsolver’s "Partita"

By Elton Uliana

Barbara Kingsolver, Partita. Faber & Faber, 2026. 432 pp. £20 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-571-40471-1.

There is an extraordinary image midway through Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita. Livia Cable, its protagonist and retrospective narrator, has spent the previous day teaching piano, eating supper with her husband, moving through the ordinary company of people she loves, while feeling herself “shut up inside a jar of time”. Everyone can see her through the glass, she tells us, but nobody can quite reach her. She has been thinking about her brother Cyrus, dead since they were children, and carrying in her pocket a letter he left behind. The image alludes first to grief, to that strange condition of being visibly present while inhabiting another time. And yet it also seems to catch something of the novel’s own way with the past, since a jar, after all, separates what it preserves. In this scene it is Livia behind the glass; increasingly elsewhere in Partita, it is the life she is remembering, a life that is still visible, sometimes almost within reach, but separated from the woman looking back at it. The further the novel progresses, the harder it becomes to leave the jar in that one scene.

Partita spends much of its time looking through that glass, finding much of its emotional force in the strange, impossible intimacy of being close to a life that is already over. Livia is remembering the young woman she once was, a gifted pianist from rural Tennessee, marked since childhood by her brother’s death, who went away to college, fell in love, damaged a hand, became pregnant, and found the life she had imagined for herself giving way to another one. But memory in Kingsolver is rarely a matter of simply retrieving what happened. The older Livia knows things the younger Livia could not have known; she has forgotten things she feels she ought to remember; and sometimes she seems to catch herself changing the past even as she tells it. The life that emerges is compellingly recovered and remade in the very act of being replayed.

Kingsolver has, of course, been interested for a long time in who gets to tell a story, and what becomes visible from where they stand. The Poisonwood Bible broke one family’s history among several women, each seeing, and sometimes failing to see, a different version of the same world; Demon Copperhead gave its survivor a voice so exuberant, funny and furious that the telling became almost inseparable from the labour of surviving. Partita moves in a more measured register and, for me, felt slightly less immediately consuming. Livia does not have Demon’s irresistible forward pull; what she has instead is the peculiar doubleness of someone looking back at a younger self she can recognise, correct, pity and occasionally mistrust. When she remembers first seeing Sigurd and thinking, “I know him”, the older woman is there almost at once to tell us that this “wasn’t true”, only to wonder, a moment later, whether perhaps it was true after all: had she recognised what she herself calls “the instrument of my downfall”. In Kingsolver’s virtuosic hands, Livia’s past seems to change key each time she plays it.

There is also a little moment much earlier in the novel that reveals, delightfully, rather more than it appears to. Remembering the phone call from Sigurd that broke a silence of more than twenty years, Livia lets something slip between brackets: “I’m pretending I don’t know exactly how many [years]”. Which rather gives the game away: pretending not to remember something requires remembering it well enough to know what you are pretending to have forgotten. More interesting still is the question of who, exactly, is doing the pretending. It seems to be the older Livia, looking back, though the oddity of retrospective narration is that the same little “I” has to accommodate the woman who lived these events and the woman who has survived long enough to tell them. Kingsolver moves between the two so easily that it is sometimes difficult to say where one Livia ends and the other begins. She knows perfectly well how many years have passed; what she seems less willing to settle is what those years have made the facts of her earlier life mean.

All this business of knowing becomes rather more brutally physical when the body gets involved, and Kingsolver has never been a writer to let an abstraction stay abstract for long. Livia discovers she is pregnant only when somebody else tells her what her own body has been doing; she seeks an abortion, the law has its own ideas about who may make that decision, and then her body overtakes them all. In one of the novel’s most painful passages, she loses the pregnancy in a sudden haemorrhage. Afterwards, lying in hospital, time comes back to her “with the cruelty of a metronome”: even bodily catastrophe in the novel is apprehended in the language of music.

But if all this makes Partita sound more cerebral than it feels to read, that would be misleading. One of the novel’s great pleasures, even when its story did not grip me quite as fiercely as Demon Copperhead, was savouring the sheer delight Kingsolver seems to take in composing it, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. She has that enviable knack of letting a sentence reach for an aphoristic or philosophical proposition, then bringing it back down into the kitchen or the barn, among the things people handle and the things they happen to say. The metronome is only one example; the novel is full of such moments. Answers become as dependable as teeth, until one goes missing and its partner is left “to grind on empty air”; Livia’s newly acquired social confidence comes with deliberately retrained vowels and inflections, even a “higher-caste feminine laugh, self-dissolving”; a grin can be syncopated, then modulate.

Music is everywhere in the novel, but I found it most interesting when Kingsolver wasn’t telling me about music at all: when it had slipped into Livia’s way of seeing, hearing and measuring the world. The book is also crowded with little propositions, riddles and sayings, sentences that sound oddly as though they had existed before Kingsolver thought of them. Flaubert collected such ready-made wisdom in his Dictionary of Received Ideas in order to expose its stupidity; Margaret Atwood likes to sharpen it until it draws blood. Kingsolver is usually warmer, more bodily, more amused by the absurdity of having large thoughts while getting on with the ordinary business of being alive. Occasionally the supply is so generous that one can almost see another eminently quotable Kingsolver sentence arriving. But that excess is part of the exuberance. Partita may not always make its machinery disappear; sometimes the pleasure lies precisely in watching a novelist this accomplished work the levers.

Something said rather casually much earlier in the novel comes back differently at the end. Young Sigurd, giving Livia one of his Marxist analyses, insists that written music is not really music until somebody plays it: the score may survive, but somebody still has to bring it into the world. Decades later Livia tells her pupils much the same thing: music is written down “wanting to live forever”, but “it’s not really here till you make it yours”. By then the idea has passed through her and become part of the way she teaches. At the final recital, Deronne can take Bach somewhere unexpected and leave it “still perfectly Bach”. And when he plays Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, music so entangled in Livia’s memory of Sigurd that she assumes the performance must somehow be meant for her, she discovers that it isn’t. Deronne is playing it for someone else. Even the music in which we store our memories refuses to remain ours.

Perhaps that is what Livia discovers about the past too. It cannot be recovered intact from its jar, and replaying it will not restore the life that was there. But it can be played differently. For a novel so full of questions about what survives us, Partita finds an unexpectedly generous answer: the score remains, though every performance makes another claim on it. As someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time watching ballet, I kept thinking of another kind of performance. Sometimes a dancer you adore appears in a work that does not possess you quite as completely as another one has. It hardly matters. The dancer is technically sublime, charismatic, so completely alive to what the choreography can do that your eyes keep returning to them. There was something of that experience for me in reading Partita. Kingsolver has that kind of presence on the page: you become conscious not only of the work but of the extraordinary artist performing it. I have been more completely swept away by Kingsolver before; but page after page in Partita, I found it remarkably difficult to take my eyes off the dancer.

***

With thanks to Lily Birch at Faber UK for providing a review copy of Partita.

Elton Uliana is a literary critic and translator. He is co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL), where he contributes to Translation Theory teaching. His work has appeared in publications including World Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, Routledge’s Art in Translation, Asymptote, West Branch, as well as in the anthologies Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023) and Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (UCL Press, 2024). < Back