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The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
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In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy -- a plain, simple child named Sophie. The attachment shocks his family and friends. This brilliant young man, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard! How can it be? A literary sensation and a bestseller in England and the United States, The Blue Flower was one of eleven books- and the only paperback- chosen as an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner in Fiction.
- Sales Rank: #133447 in eBooks
- Published on: 1997-04-15
- Released on: 2013-06-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote her first novel 20 years ago, at the age of 59. Since then, she's written eight more, three of which have been short-listed for England's prestigious Booker Prize, and one of which, Offshore, won. Now she's back with her tenth and best book so far, The Blue Flower. This is the story of Friedrich von Hardenberg--Fritz, to his intimates--a young man of the late 18th century who is destined to become one of Germany's great romantic poets. In just over 200 pages, Fitzgerald creates a complete world of family, friends and lovers, but also an exhilarating evocation of the romantic era in all its political turmoil, intellectual voracity, and moral ambiguity. A profound exploration of genius, The Blue Flower is also a charming, wry, and witty look at domestic life. Fritz's family--his eccentric father and high-strung mother; his loving sister, Sidonie; and brothers Erasmus, Karl, and the preternaturally intelligent baby of the family, referred to always as the Bernhard--are limned in deft, sure strokes, and it is in his interactions with them that the ephemeral quality of genius becomes most tangible. Even his unlikely love affair with young Sophie von Kühn makes perfect sense as Penelope Fitzgerald imagines it.
The Blue Flower is a magical book--funny, sad, and deeply moving. In Fritz Fitzgerald has discovered a perfect character through whom to explore the meaning of love, poetry, life, and loss. In The Blue Flower readers will find a work of fine prose, fierce intelligence, and perceptive characterization.
From Library Journal
Fitzgerald never repeats herself, and her latest novel, named Book of the Year by 19 British newspapers in 1995, is her most original book yet. Here she reconstructs the life of 18th-century German romantic poet Novalis, focusing on his boisterous family, his struggle to articulate his longings, and, most tellingly, his passion for 12-year-old Sophie, a simple child he intends to marry despite the furious reservations of family and friends. Fitzgerald doesn't make it entirely clear what draws Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis's real name) to little Sophie?but that is precisely the point. Throughout, he is carried aloft by an inchoate desire for something beyond that is summed up in his little story of the blue flower: "I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower....I can imagine and think about nothing else." As a counterpoint to her protagonist's beautifully captured romanticism, Fitzgerald successfully evokes the sights, sound, and smells?and the constant sorrows?of domestic life in 18th-century Germany. A little treasure; highly recommended.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The German poet Novalis (17721801) was really Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg: and Fitzgerald (The Gates of Angels, 1992; Offshore, 1987, etc.) here re-creates him, his family, his doomed young lover Sophie von Kuhn, and Sophie's huge family--not to mention the era all of them lived in--in the most human-sized and yet intellectually capacious narrative a reader could wish for. Times were once better for the Hardenbergs, who've sold two estates, may have to sell another, and meanwhile live in a more manageable house in town. The pious and old (he's 56) father of the many-childrened family is Director of the Salt Mining Administration of Saxony, one of the few vocations (the military is another) not forbidden to members of the aristocracy, and the same calling the oldest Hardenberg son, Fritz, will follow upon conclusion of his studies at the universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg. To say he's a salt inspector, though, is a little like saying Shakespeare was an actor. Not only have Fritz's studies brought him among faculty the likes of Fichte, Schiller, and Schlegel--but he himself is already a visionary poet helping bring the 18th century to its close (`` `The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards' ''). What transpires, then, in the inward universe, when Fritz first sees 12-year- old Sophie von Khn standing at a window looking out? Says he: `` `Something happened to me.' '' This cheerful, careless, laughing child-woman becomes Fritz's star, his guide, ``his Philosophy.'' Against all precedent (Sophie isn't of the real nobility), and in keeping with the changing times (there's been the revolution in France), he gets his father's permission to become engaged--but dreadful sorrow lies just ahead. A historical novel that's touching, funny, unflinchingly tragic, and at the same time uncompromising in its accuracy, learning, and detail: a book that brings its subject entirely alive, almost nothing seeming beyond its grasp. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
123 of 132 people found the following review helpful.
Not For Every Taste
By Paul Frandano
Cutting straight to the chase after reading the very polarized views of other reviewers: Although Penelope Fitzgerald's slender novel contains much to admire, it is most certainly not composed to be a popular entertainment, and its successes will appeal more to admirers of "literary fiction"--and, hence, to "critics"--than perhaps to the general reader. Fitzgerald presumes the reader knows something, and cares, about the late 18th Century context; she hopes we might be stimulated by imagining contemporaries of Fichte and Kant discussing their ideas; she presumes that, to us, "romanticism" is more than a word or a line from Shelly and that, by recovering, or compiling, everyday details from a time and world long lost, she can help us understand the romantic sensibility and, ultimately, Hardenberg's--and our--ambiguous longing for "the Blue Flower."
I particularly enjoyed Fitzgerald's vignette approach--55 short chapters, each of which is a set piece, generally with a wry punchline--which allows Fitzgerald to view Friedrich von Hardenberg's improbable romance at odd angles. I for one marvel at this choice of subject, a decision by a professional author as seemingly improbable and hopelessly romantic as the subject itself.
And yet, despite the author's absolute mastery of her material, her strong cast of winning characters, and the wonderful--although irretrievably high-brow--sense of humor suffusing the entire narrative, I never felt myself emotionally drawn in. One reads on because each page is delightful, and, for many readers (obviously, me included) this is sufficient. But on the basis of slender narrative evidence, we are expected to understand, rather than led toward empathy with, Hardenberg and his inconceivable attachment. Perhaps Fitzgerald's plan was, in writing the simplest of love stories, to avoid cluttering the universe with additional examples of cheap sentimentalism, leaving us with a "mystery of love." In different hands, the novel clearly might have become just that--dismissively sentimental. Instead, she goes the other way: Fitzgerald is a cool observer keenly attuned, in a very modern sense, to the ironies her story poses, but she never truly enages our hearts.
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
Wow! How could this be written by someone who wasn't there?
By Ricardo Ramos
This is the most likable of the four PF novels I've read (I admire all of them). Her ability to create characters with extreme economy is breath-taking. Even more than in _Blue Flower_, she illuminates a milieu distant and time and space, the Moscow of a British businessman in Moscow ca. 1913 (i.e., on the verge of the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution further off). I don't really know that there were households or businesses like those she brings to life. If the concrete details are imagined rather than researched, her accomplishment is even greater, but it is also considerable if she has "merely" brought back to life vanished Russian and expatrate English ways of being.
One of Fitzgerald's many gifts is creating prematurely wise prepubescent female characters (as in _The Bookshop_ and _Offshore_) who view the fumblings of adults with clear-eyed but mostly gracious bemusement and fitfully attempt to keep the adults from totally mucking up. Dolly takes that role here. The omniscient narrator has her own compassionate bemusement at the frailities of adults who want to be loved and try to be useful to others. Frank and Selwyn are prime examples from this book. As far as I can tell, the only thing Ms. Fitzgerald can't do is create rounded prepubescent male characters (Ben here).
48 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
comment on non-personal German Romanticism
By A Customer
"The Blue Flower" is a comment on German Romanticism (Novalis was a famous Romantic poet), primarily addressing two characteristics: 1. that the highest experience is the "weltschmerz" of Goethe, the melancholy loneliness achieved by uniting oneself to non-personal nature; 2. that the child (the primitive, the noble savage -Rousseau) who achieves this union naturally is to be elevated to an ideal. As a matter of fact the book is patterned on Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which sparked the German Romantic movement and in fact was blamed for the suicide of many of its readers. In the melancholy loneliness of union with the non-personal deity, nature, there is no difference between life and death. Suicide is embraced as a melding with nature- the Bernhard walks into the water and both he and Fritz want to die. In the 18th c. due in large part to the success of Newton and other scientists, non-personal nature had started to replace the personal God. The philosophy of science derives from British empiricism - nothing can be known except through experience and all knowledge must be tested against the individual entity. Novalis and the German Romantics objected to the resulting mechanical image of the world brought on by science. They were steeped in and shaped by the philosophy of the great German thinker, Kant, who wrote in response to the Scottish empiricist, Hume. Kant proposes that our minds and our knowledge of the external world are not separate things but are one, turning the emphasis away from the reality of the objective external entity. For Kant our knowledge of the world reflects more about the structure of the mind than it tells us of the outside world, so he speaks of something like sieves in the mind - space/time, cause/effect - which sift our experience and mold our impressions. The subjective, self-conscious becomes the primary source of reality. Followers of Kant like Fichte, who taught Novalis, carried this to the extreme and became pure mentalists. For them reality results from the struggles of the inner self-conscious; the individual entity does not even exist (Kant never went this far). The German Romantics are closely allied to this philosophy in its emphasis on the subjective self-conscious creating reality. But Novalis also criticizes the mentalists for leaving no room for love, emotions, feelings. He sought to harmonize the inner, subjective self-conscious with nature which had become a mechanical clock of mechanical parts. The Romantics felt that primitive man or the child had an immediate relation to nature, a certain oneness, but the 18th c. man of feeling had been alienated from nature. In the tradition of Kant their emphasis was on the inner self-conscious and they turned inward to poetry and music. The Schlegels and Novalis believed that poetry as metaphor created the fantasy and mythology which would rejoin man to nature. Their new image of the world was the organic flower, rather than the machine. They also had a theory of irony whereby they ridiculed common sense and the expected, traditional way of doing things, in an effort to reveal the inadequacy of reality, thus to destroy it and supplant it with their poetic image. This is basically an egotistical philosophy seeking union of the inner self with a nature devoid of person - to find the blue flower one turns away from family and friends and seeks a "blue" (melancholy) union alone with a rarity of nature. Fritz and the Bernhard in the story are unable to love. Fritz does not really love Sophie nor care about her fulfillment. He would keep her a child. There is perhaps a close identity between this Romanticism and the later philosophy of Existentialism, where the non-personlism of nature becomes the "benign indifference of the universe" and there is no meaning to becoming. Sophie is more a heroine, as she begins to grow as a person ( in relation to other persons), then Fritz is a hero. His brother Erasmus seems to break through the stifling pathos of the era, really loves Sophie and finds joy. The names, Erasmus and Bernhard, by evoking historical characters, become symbolically significant to the theme. The story takes place in post Reformation Germany (Fritz's family belong to a Protestan sect) and it is historically Erasmus of Rotterdam who is Luther's intellectual counterpart and who does not break away from the existing church. Erasmus esteems joy and regrets the lack of it in some of the reformers. The Bernhard's name is a combination of his mother's name and his fathers's. His mother's name Bernardine is ridiculed by the father. St. Bernard from the Middle Ages spoke of each believer having a mystical experience with the personal God. This mysticism is rejected by some of the Protestant reformers. The Bernhard achieves a kind of melancholic, mystical union with the non-personal nature-deity. Fritz' friend, the young doctor Dietmahler, muses that he can save himself by going to Britain. Philosophically England offers him an esape from those who would deny reality (or the existence of the external individual entity in favor of the primacy of the inner self-conscious). In the British empiricism of Hume and Locke, knowledge comes from the interaction with the physical world, where the individual entity really exists. Experiential konwledge implies growth, and imparts meaning to becoming. Tangentially with this appeal to the Empiricist school I think the author may have been commenting on the indifference to cruelty which could coexist with the mentalists like Fichte and the German romantics, who would deny the reality of the individual entity. For Fritz the individual entity and hence the differences between entitiies is not real. Fritz searches for a unit that could be used to measure the physical as well as the spiritual. This unit where both dimensions subsist is the individual person, who by definition can only exist in relation to others. The Romantic sees eveerything melding into the non-personal, non-differentiated, soup of nature, hence Fritz' constant assertion, "all is one." With the reality of the person denied, the opposition to cruelty diminishes. Perhaps the history of philosophy brings us to the choice of personal or non-personal ideal, even personal or non-personal God.
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