Livia, a gifted young pianist from a Southern dairy-farm community, is haunted by her brother's death on the railroad tracks and by the question of how he could do it. Structured like a Bach partita, the novel follows her through conservatory ambition, a doomed love affair, injury, and a return to the farm and the neighbors she left.
Books mentioned in Partita (8)
The Wreck of the Hesperus by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “the Wreck of the Hesperus, and the rest of us took it up without knowing it was a poem, about a shipwreck. Mickie ... gave me the poem to read”
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: “wouldn't your literature students all be reading Marvel Comics instead of Wuthering Heights?”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “Why should anybody ask them to read Hamlet or play a sonata?”
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: “she got down a paperback called The Name of the Rose that I guessed was my brother's”
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: “Were we like 'The Gift of the Magi,' then? ... that Christmas story about giving presents. The girl cuts off her long hair”
Harlem by Langston Hughes: “There's this famous poem by Langston Hughes that asks what happens to a dream that gets deferred.”
Ondine by Aloysius Bertrand: “"It was inspired by a poem by Aloysius Bertrand about a water nymph who sings a beautiful song to seduce a man" (Ravel's Ondine)”
Der Erlkönig by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “retells the boy, father and the Erlkönig narrative of "Der Erlkönig" (via Schubert's setting)”