How dare I refuse to give this book that was named Book of the Year by nineteen British newspapers in 1995 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997 anything less than a five?NYT reviewer Michael Hofmann wrote of The Blue Flower: It is an interrogation of life, love, purpose, experience and horizons, which has found its perfect vehicle in a few years from the pitifully short life of a German youth about to become a great poet -- one living in a period of intellectual and political upheaval, when even the prevailing medical orthodoxy ''held that to be alive was not a natural state.” -In, Nonsense Is Only Another Language: Penelope Fitzgerald uses fiction to examine an 18th-century German poet and his doomed love for a 12-year-old girl.Yet, For me The Blue Flower is at best a 3.75.Why? because I loved Fitzgerald’s earlier work, The Bookshop and because Kleist’s editor and publisher Ludwig Tieck (1773-18530), - a romantic writer who had outlived Novalis and virtually the rest of his entire generation describes the The Blue Flower’s female love interest, the real Christiane Wilhelmine Sophie von Kühn as a girl who "gave an impression . . . so gracious and spiritually lovely--we must call [it] superearthly or heavenly, while through this radiant and almost transparent countenance of hers we would be struck with the fear that it was too tender and delicately woven for this life, that it was death or immortality which looked at us so penetratingly from those shining eyes".That’s a lively and compelling enough entourage to encourage my readership of The Blue Flower, but the loving of it? That’d take more, something more like a sci-fi setting for William Shakespeare's The Tempest? That can actually work, be fun, and be fun to talk about in the bar afterward over drinks.The Blue Flower on the other hand is NO FUN. The author sets 'em up and knocks 'em down (just as life did) but really, how funny is that? If you’re not sure, today there are a couple copies available on goodreads swap, or maybe my little screenplay below will tell you how it goes? (If I get ambitious I'll work up an animation of this with stick figures acting out all the parts, but til then this is all I've got to offer:(view spoiler)[The Cast:Fritz aka Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801): He will later take the pen-name Novalis and become a German Romantic poet of lasting repute. Here he is another of Fitzgerald’s innocents who destroys all around him through his naivete and romanticism or perhaps he is just an unfortunate disease vector.Sophie, the love interest of Fritz (& later also his brother, Erasmus) described either as a somewhat stupid, unexceptional young girl who is not yet a lady or as superearthly/heavenly. Take your pick. It doesn’t matter.The Bernhard Fritz and Erasmus’s little brother, no longer a toddler.ChristophFritz and Erasmus’s littlest brother who doesn’t thrive.Gunther Sophie’s little brother who has the household’s cough but is described by Fritz as stronger “by far than our Christoph” his own little brother.George Sophie’s older little brother, no longer a toddler. The Doctor -Who had never had the chance to hear the opening of "The Blue Flower" but if he had done so he could have said immediately what he thought it meant.The Mandelsloh Sophie’s Companion, a mature, attractive married woman.Sophie's Tutor A man who could teach her nothing.TB: Tabes mesenterica -Tuberculosis of the mesenteric and retroperitoneal lymph nodes. Sometimes manifests as Tuberculosis of lymph glands inside the abdomen. I read somewhere that it was thought to be an illness of children caused by drinking milk from cows infected with TB. (Now uncommon as milk is pasteurized ) Act One, Scene One: Germany late 1700s at Weißenfels in Saxony on the River SaaleFritz is chasing The Bernhard among some barges moored together.Fritz: "Bernhard!" Catching hold of the child’s wrist as he falls between two barges being forced together by the waters. The Bernhard: "I will never come back, Let me go, let me die!"Fritz: "Make an effort! Do you want to drown?"The Berhard: “Would it matter if I did?”Fritz: To audience while hauling his little brother into his arms, "How heavy a child is when it gives up responsibility". Act One, Scene Two at Sophie’s House:Fritz sees Sophie, falls in love. Sophie plays with her little brother, Gunther. George: To Fritz, "Your horse is an old nag."Gunther: coughs.Fritz: To Sophie, ignoring George, “He smiles and coughs at us all alike, I'm flattered when my turn comes.“Sophie: smiles at GuntherFritz: smiles at Sophie, “Sophie -be my guardian spirit”Act Two, Scene One at Sophie’s HouseSophie: to Fritz & her companion, the Mandelsloh, "I have a pain in my left side, and that is not my own doing.” Laughs.Fritz: smiles, departs room. The Mandelsloh to Sophie: “He could have heard you!, do you want him to know you are sick?”Sophie: “He took no notice . . . I laughed and so he did not notice it”.Act Two, Scene Two in Sophie’s room. Everyone is there from Fritz and Sophie’s families as Sophie’s old tutor reads from Cicero. People laugh, dogs jump about and Sophie coughs. A doctor enters with his black bag. Narrator: “The Doctor had never had the chance to hear the opening of The Blue Flower" but if he had done so he could have said immediately what he thought it meant”Tutor: turning away from the assembled characters, to audience, visibly giving up, perhaps even shrugging “ I can’t continue . . . after all, these people were born for joy !“Doctor : Examines Sophie ” She has TB. The most usual signs and symptoms are the appearance of a chronic, painless mass in the neck, which is persistent and usually grows with time. The mass is referred to as a "cold abscess", because there is no accompanying local color or warmth and the overlying skin acquires a violaceous (bluish-purple) color. Scrofula caused by tuberculosis is usually accompanied by other symptoms of the disease, such as fever, chills, malaise and weight loss. As the lesion progresses, the skin becomes adhered to the mass and may rupture, forming a sinus and an open wound."The Bernhard: over the clamor in the room, to audience, . “Everyone else heard what I did, and yet none of them paid him serious attention."The Curtain DropsFinale The narrator's voice says: “They will nearly all die of TB, except The Bernhard, the water will get him first of all after Sophie.The End. (hide spoiler)]
This is a sad story about a doomed love and short lives. But it is a bit of a misfire if the central premise, the love story, does not work.Penelope Fitzgerald was a gifted writer who could make something out of very little and in unlikely circumstances. With the The Bookshop she made a memorable story out of a middle-aged woman starting a bookshop in a disused, damp (a telling detail) building in a small English rural town against formidable opposition. Here she attempts something more ambitious. She seeks to flesh out the noble ardour of a real life historical figure (Fritz von Hardenberg aka the philosopher poet Novalis) in late eighteenth century Germany.(view spoiler)[ As a young undergraduate, von Hardenberg meets and falls in love with Sophie, a sickly 12 year old girl who soon enough dies of consumption. Novalis himself lasted only a few more years. The story is told with great authenticity, from the domestic lives of the several families and the frustrations of key characters to the economics of the region and the high level of mortality, in that time.My edition has a portrait of a young girl in a reflective pose on the cover. It is one of my favourites. The painting, Portrait of Jeanne de Bauer, is by Fernand Khnopff. It captures a young girl’s innocence, perhaps her sadness and even resignation. In the story, Sophie barely enters her own limited society before she starts to withdraw from it, as she ails. Perhaps Fritz sees, in her, his blue flower, something frail but pure, unworldly but enchanting. In symbolic terms the search for the blue flower represents reaching for the unreachable. It becomes a problem if the unreachable is also the unknowable or perhaps at best, the intangible. Fritz’s search is unfulfilling for him in any real sense and sadly, for us. The story has added poignancy because Fritz fails completely to see that there is someone else who loves him, who is objectively, far more sensible a match, but it is not to be.The Blue Flower does nevertheless leave an after image on my cerebral retina, because the striking world Fitzgerald creates, with its beautifully written practical details of rural life, especially regarding the responsibilities of the family, and the limitations within which people live (and often, not for very long). Von Hardenberg is the son of a family whose father who owns and runs several estates. They are therefore of the land owning class, but by no means rolling in money. Even the continuing education of his son is part of this financial equation. His father deals with this and other tribulations with some equanimity. He is equable, realistic. There’s little help in the gratuitous advice which he receives from his brother, a man with opinions, but little responsibility. It is hard to be romantic when you have to be practical. Fritz’s mother has almost lost the power to move; it is Fritz and his younger brother, The Bernhard who can afford idealism and imagination. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about The Blue Flower (1997)?
This Booker Prize winner is a fascinating study of life in late 17th-century Germany. One hilarious anecdote concerned washing clothes. Most of the upper-class families did the washing every 3 months. One man on the household owned 69 shirts. Our protagonist, Fridrich's family did the wash only once a year. There were 14 children in the family and numerous servants. This was before washers and dryers were invented. It blows my mind--and that isn't even what the book is about.The book is a biographical snapshot of perhaps the most important 3 years in the life and love of the poet known as Novalis. He grew up in so large a family that children weren't always watched and diseases of the time spread unchecked. He wasn't suited for much other than poetry, but was forced to manage a salt mine because it was acceptable employment for impoverished royalty. But the REAL story revolves around the 12 year old girl he fell in love with. If you read The Blue Flower, you'll gasp at the ending...This should be required reading for high schools everywhere.
—Luckngrace
Oh dear. Awful. Just awful. Even more so, given how much I adored my first Penelope Fitzgerald last summer (Offshore) and that AS Byatt called this "a masterpiece". I'm baffled.The prose is plodding - even though it's portraying a poet: short, banal sentence, after short banal sentence. I found the characters, setting and plot hard to imagine, care about or believe in - even though it's based on real life. I forced myself to finish it, thinking there must be something worthwhile to come. I failed to find it. I was just bored. And irritated.True StoryThis is a fictionalised account, but it seems to be fairly close to the facts, and some of the diary entries quoted here, are genuine historical documents.It's set in a noble, pious, Protestant family in Germany, in the late 1700s. It concerns Fritz, who later became a famous romantic and philosophical poet known as Novalis. This book covers the slightly earlier period, around the time he succumbed to a coup de foudre over twelve-year old Sophie. Given the period, it's all very chaste; nothing like Lolita, which is a far more disturbing book, but is beautifully written, and hence powerful and compelling. So no, nothing like this.PlotFritz attends university in several towns, studying a variety of subjects and dabbling in philosophy. He meets various people. Afterwards, he trains to be a salt mine inspector like his father. He meets more people, including Sophie's family. He is welcomed, and spends a lot of time there. It's another large family, but utterly different from his own. Goethe makes an appearance and gives his opinion on the relationship.The French Revolution is going on in the background. Some are slightly fearful; others vaguely support it.The brief afterword made me laugh: it was like a satirical summary of a typical operatic plot. Even less appropriately, it reminded me of a scene in comedy sci-fi show, Red Dwarf: (view spoiler)[Holly to Lister, "They're all dead. Everybody's dead, Dave." (hide spoiler)]
—Cecily
I picked up this book because it had a pretty cover. I noticed it had a blurb on the front from A.S. Byatt, whom I rather like, and it also noted that the author, Fitzgerald, was a winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. So I looked at the back cover, and saw that it was a historical novel about the early life of the German Romantic poet Novalis - which was quite a coincidence, since I'd just that month been reading about Novalis and looking at some of his poetry online. So I grabbed it!However, at first I couldn't get into the book, and as I read through it, it began to actively annoy me.Fitzgerald obviously did a lot of research for the book, reading Novalis' letters, writings, documents from the time period... (late 18th-century).Unfortunately, rather than working these period details subtly into the narrative, she just bluntly inserts random facts into the text, even when they don't really serve a purpose in the story. It's distracting, and struck me as poor writing technique.Her personal, 20th-century opinion on everything also shines through - and it's not a positive opinion. In my opinion, the 'job' of historical fiction is to take the reader into the time and place described, and to make the reader see things from the characters' point of view. Instead, we find out that Penelope Fitzgerald thinks that people in 18th-century Germany ate disgusting cuisine, were unhygenic, penurious - and for some reason she seems to think they were always freezing cold, even though Germany has a mild climate and particularly nice summers. I'm sorry, but if the characters would think that a pig's nostril was a delicacy, I want to FEEL that it's a delicacy while I'm reading the book. I don't care if the author personally thinks it's gross. By the end of the book, I wondered why she even chose to write about these people, since her opinion of not only their culture and lifestyle - but of them personally - was so low.Fritz (Novalis) is portrayed as faintly ridiculous and a cad, and his love interest, the young Sophie, as air-headed and ugly. Both of their families come across as caricatures - one of the ridiculously strict and religious variety, and one of the jolly yet greedy and grasping type... I can certainly appreciate books where the characters are all unlikable - but I didn't get the impression that these people really were, historically, that bad - just that Fitzgerald personally regards them with a kind of snide contempt. There's no one in the novel that the reader gets to even really, feel that you know, due to the distancing style of the writing. Fitzgerald uses an odd style of referring to people using an article: "The Bernhard," "The Mandelsloh." Even if this was a custom at the time (I don't know if it was - it's not a modern German usage), such a construction should be saved for dialogue, not when the author is talking about her characters.I couldn't believe the multiple pages of rave reviews printed inside the front of the book - I really didn't think it was impressive in any way.
—Althea Ann
