AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver says thank you to the following people in the back of her new book - her agent, her editor, her publishing team and her hand doctor. Hands play a big part in the novel, which is titled "Partita." It's about a young classical pianist who has the talent to really make it in that world and out of Appalachia until she doesn't. Kingsolver spoke with Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: In the living room of Barbara Kingsolver's house in southwestern Virginia, that is in Appalachia, is a piano.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Yeah, I'm working on this minuet. It's just...
(Playing piano).
LIMBONG: And even though there are stacks of music on the piano - some going back to recitals she's played in middle school - this is a small taste. This is all the piano playing I'm getting out of her.
KINGSOLVER: I'm not going to play for you (laughter). I'll just head that one off at the pass. I don't have anything really prepared right now because I've just been through another hand issue, so I don't have anything.
LIMBONG: She has a condition called Dupuytren's contracture.
KINGSOLVER: It's an inherited condition that causes the fascia in the hands to contract. So it's - the goal of Dupuytren's contracture is to make your hands into fists. What it means for me is I have to have surgeries every few years to open my hands back up so that I can play the piano.
LIMBONG: You'll notice, we've been spending a long time talking about the piano. When we chatted, she didn't seem very concerned about how the condition affected her typing. She found some ways to work around it. And in a lot of ways, classical piano was Kingsolver's first love. That's what she studied in school.
KINGSOLVER: For one year in college, and I quickly figured out that I was not going to be one of the 10 people in the United States who would make it as a concert pianist. I wasn't, you know, of that caliber.
LIMBONG: Livia, the main character of Kingsolver's new novel "Partita," is of that caliber. But when we meet her at the beginning, we find out that she didn't make it either. Sure, there's an incident involving her hand, but there was also, in her past, a hot and charming guy named Sigurd.
You know, I laughed a lot. He's the type of guy who'll literally read Marx as foreplay.
KINGSOLVER: Yeah, right.
LIMBONG: Which I was like, that's...
KINGSOLVER: Literally reads Marx as foreplay.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KINGSOLVER: (Laughter).
LIMBONG: I'm not sure if that would work on me, personally, you know. I think that's (inaudible) but yeah.
KINGSOLVER: He's just that sexy.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KINGSOLVER: He's also (laughter) - he's a handful. But he's really charismatic. He's one of those people who is kind of a born leader, and, you know, I mean, we've all run into them. He - there's something about him that people want to follow.
LIMBONG: Livia meets Sigurd when she's at school, when she's dealing with a lot - the loss of her brother, the distance she feels from her mother, feeling out of place in this new world. Their young love risks swallowing completely all the other stuff Livia has got going on in her life, but he's not the love of her life or at least not the only one.
KINGSOLVER: It became kind of a set of nested boxes. There's a love story inside of a bigger love story, and then I realized the huge love story wrapped around all of this is that eternal longing that we have for art and beauty.
LIMBONG: A partita is a musical form made up of different parts. There are slow parts, fast parts, happy parts, sad parts. The book is structured in this way. There are the preludes, the allemande, the toccata and so on and so forth. You don't have to know what any of those words mean. You don't even have to know a lick about classical music to relate to Livia. You just need the experience of having longed for something beautiful, which, haven't we all?
Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
CHANG: And you can hear the full interview on NPR's Book of the Day podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF JONUFF'S "MIND BLOWN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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