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The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe, in the small towns and great universities of late eighteenth-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father's permission to wed his "heart's heart," his "spirit's guide"-a plain, simple child named Sophie von K�hn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be? The irrationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one's own fate-these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor.… (more)
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None of which is to take away from the book's great merits: beautifully written, hysterically funny, and particularly enjoyable for trainspotting purposes (*love* the catty Schlegels and the jokes at Fichte's expense).
But my suspicion, and hope, is that Penelope is floating above us somewhere laughing at the human being's ability to mistake irony for passion. Here we have a novel in which a silly but highly intelligent young man falls in love with a 12 year old girl who is, precisely, a 12 year old girl. He does not fall in love with the 27 year old woman that the reader really wants him to fall in love with. His brother proceeds to also fall in love with the (now) 13 year old girl instead of the (now) 28 year old woman he should fall in love with. This is the background for one of the most famous symbols in romantic literature, the blue flower: what is it? Why on earth would you want it?
Anyway, the moral of this story is i) that all men are remarkably silly. They're either romantics who get rewarded for blathering on at great length about nothing, pietists who will put their family through hell, or morons in other less obvious way. And ii) that if you're a sensible, intelligent woman who thinks she's found a sensible, intelligent man, give it a year and he'll reveal himself to be remarkably silly by falling in love with a child or thinking that, because you're a little nervous around him, you hate him (he will then run away from you). Also, you will all die of consumption.
Rest in peace Ms. Fitzgerald. May your ghost encourage others to write beautifully.
The book has its irritating aspects - for instance, I didn't like the slightly clumsy Germanisms she puts in to disguise the fact that we're reading the book in English ("the Bernhard"), but on the whole it's an amusing, moderately thought-provoking palate-cleanser when you've been exposed to the worst aspects of Romanticism. And it's not quite a satire: there's a strong element of explaining where the Romantics were coming from, trying to give us a feel for what it might have been like to live in a time when science had made all questions ask able but - at least for practical everyday purposes like healthcare - hadn't yet answered very many of them.
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.
The only characters that are in the slightest bit lively are peripheral to the central love story, Fritz’s (Novalis’s) good-hearted brother Erasmus and sister Sidonie, Karoline, who loves Fritz even though she fails the literary interpretation test he gives her (best scene in the book, in my opinion), and “the Mandelsoh” Sophie’s no-nonsense older step-sister. I’m glad I read this book because it gave me a glimpse into the customs of a distant place and time (early 1800’s Germany) but I didn’t find it easy going. Even though this book won a lot of accolades when it was published, I think the author made a mistake in putting such inaccesssible characters in such an unfamiliar setting. Either make the characters opaque or the setting, I’d say, not both.
And Fritz imagines. Then Sophie - "his Philosophie" gets ill:
"Shall I stay?"
"If you stayed here, you would not be wanted as a nurse", the Mandelsloh replied. "You would be wanted as a liar".
Fritz raised his heavy head. "What then should I say?
"You look a little better this morning Söphen."
"I could not lie to her, more than I could lie to myself."
"I don´t know to what extent a poet lies to himself."
And later, at home to his brother Erasmus:
"I could not stay," Fritz told him.
Paradox and irony are too reductive words for describing this powerful book about the clash of the worlds, the material and the spiritual. Now they are all dead, Sophia, Fritz, Karoline, Erasmus, the Bernhard and all the rest of them, the courageous and the foolish alike. Truly no imagination saved them from that - All dead? What about the blue flower? Oh - it blooms. With a fragrance more contagious than consumption, it flowers with a deadly flame that burns with the life we bring to it, reading....
Materially: So easy reading, uncomplicated storyline, straightforward language, short.
Spiritually: I share Fritz feeling when carrying the Bernhard, saving him from drowning. "How heavy a child is when it gives up responsibility". Left more than a bit blue .... heavy actually, by the reality of what lives and what dies.
This is a pretty brief book considering how much more Fitzgerald could have explored with these people, but I think it worked well. I don't know much about this era of Germany, except for the study of musicians and composers at the time, who of course were also influenced by the philosophers, poets, and writers of the day. It's an interesting time period and I'd like to read more about it. Interesting to contrast with what was going on in France at the time.
Recommended for literary historical fiction readers.