Partita is a psychological mystery as complex as the extraordinary violin solo music by Bach. Ernst Feidler-a brilliant linguist, psychologist, and violinist-commits a shocking and unexplainable suicide at the height of his career. His devastated wife, Manou, is left to raise their four children and piece together the hidden motives behind the death of her beloved Ernst.
The iconoclastic European couple rode the intense post-World War II world into the cultural upheavals of the 1960s with tireless energy. Through Manou's progressively deeper scrutiny of their life, she unveils his descent into psychosis and her own participation in his decline. Finally, she gives birth to a new self without him.
"Herrmann brings honesty, sensitivity, and compassion to this heartbreaking tale of living with - and losing - a family member who is mentally ill. Clear-eyed and unflinching, it is the story of one woman's determination not just to survive, but to thrive through love and understanding. PARTITA is a triumph."
Summer Wood, author of the novel Arroyo
"This elegant and evocative book is sure to touch the heart and awaken the imagination of intelligent readers everywhere"
Sean Murphy, novelist, author of The Hope Valley Hubcap King and The Time of New Weather
"From the first arresting sentence, Madeleine Herrmann launches this tense psychological detective story. She fluently mixes chronologies as she tells of Manou's marriage, the tragic suicide of her husband, and her own search for meaning. Hermann's thought-provoking work swirls with complex motivations and mistakes made by helping professionals. As Manou gradually comes to an understanding of Ernst's death, she finds she has come into a more confident sense of herself."
Ann Jauregui, PhD, author of Epiphanies: Where Science & Miracles Meet
Madeleine Herrmann was born in Lyon, France, on March 17, 1930. She lived through the World War II years in Nantes, which was bombed repeatedly by the Americans. After the war, Madeleine became a competitive athlete who won French national track and field titles and participated in the University World Games in 1949 in Budapest. She studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d Éducation Physique in Paris and then received a Fullbright Scholarship to study at the University of Iowa. There she met Fred Herrmann, a German linguist and gifted violinist.
Madeleine and Fred defied the age-old hostility between the Germans and the French and married. They lived in California, built two houses, and raised four children. Madeleine pioneered physical fitness classes for women and children in California and graduated from UC Berkeley in 1962 with a master s degree. Tragically, Fred Herrmann committed suicide in 1969. Madeleine raised their four children on her own and then, in 1983, she went back to college to study Transpersonal Psychology in the master s program at JFK University in Orinda, CA. She has lived in Taos, New Mexico, since 1992.
In 1986, her book of poetry, L Envolée Magique (Editions Saint-Germain-Des Prés),
was published in France. In it she explored the essence of the feminine and the masculine. She has continued writing poetry, plays, short stories, a children s story, and Partita, a psychological novel exploring the mysteries of human sorrow, love, and music. The story is Madeleine s fictional exploration of the causes of her husband s suicide, and presents the view of a woman struggling to find answers for disturbing reality that the man she loved and thought she knew suddenly took his own life. Many readers are moved by the way the tragedy speaks to incomprehensible emotional events in their own lives.
Madeleine Herrmann has read from Partita around the country and she has been featured in person on the online "The Authors Show." She is presently working on two other novels. About to turn eighty, Madeleine Herrmann is finally realizing the dream of her life: to share through writing some of the wisdom she has learned through the rocky, romantic, and exotic events of her rich life.
