The Blue Flower

Rating:
Summary: Terrible
Review: After reading the reviews I was very excited about reading this book.
It was just awful. No character development or plot, and turgid writing. If anyone else had written this it would not have been published.
For the past 10 years or so the books that won the Booker prize have been bad bad bad.

Rating:
Summary: Very Odd, but I Did Like It
Review: I found "The Blue Flower" to be an odd little book both in style and in content. Set in eighteenth century Germany, "The Blue Flower" tells the true story of university student, Friedrich von Hardenberg, (the man who was later to become known as the poet, Novalis), and his love for a simple-minded young girl of twelve, Sophie von Kuehn. I have to admit that were this story not true, the plot would have been preposterous. Somehow, Fitzgerald made me believe in this improbable love and in the families involved. This was quite a feat, I think, especially given the fact that Fitzgerald never allows us to become too emotionally involved with the characters but keeps us rather distanced instead.

"The Blue Flower" isn't a conventional novel with a straightforward narrative. Instead, it's episodic and told in fifty-five very short chapters (quite a few for a book of just about 200 pages). If you think this makes the book seem choppy, let me asssure you, it doesn't. Fitzgerald's writing, and the story of Fritz and Sophie is as smooth as silk. This episodic quality, however, is what causes us to feel somewhat distanced from the characters. If you're a reader who needs or wants a lot of involvement in a story, you might be disappointed with "The Blue Flower."

Even though "The Blue Flower" makes use of some rather unusual stylistic techniques, Fitzgerald doesn't seem to have been employing them simply for the sake of either art or experimentation. Given the subject matter, I think she made perfect choices throughout.

"The Blue Flower" is a book set in the Germany of Goethe and it's peppered with German words and phrases. Luckily, German is a language in which I'm fluent so I didn't find the inclusion of so much of it off-putting in the least. I do think that readers who are unfamiliar with either German or the German speaking world might have a little problem, though. For example, I think there are some who could read the entire book and, at its conclusion, still be wondering what a "Freiherr" was. Fitzgerald offers us no explanations and, on the whole, I thik her choice was a perfect one, but the reader needs to be warned.

"The Blue Flower" is also peppered with humor and wit. I found this surprising and I'm in awe of Fitzgerald's abilities. On the surface, one would expect this to be a rather dull, dry story or one given to excessive melodrama. It's neither. Both its humor and its pathos are perfectly tuned.

To repeat, "The Blue Flower" is a book based on highly improbable, yet true, facts. It's episodic in style and never permits the reader full engagement with the characters. If any of these elements cause you to to dislike a book, then you'd be better off choosing one of Fitzgerald's other offerings. Be assured though, this isn't a case of "style over substance." The substance is definitely there; it's just presented in a rather innovative manner.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a writer whose books are truly "little gems." I know readers who feel she let us down with "The Blue Flower" but she didn't. It's different, but it's still wonderful. The fact that some readers may not care for this difference does nothing to detract from the book itself. If you read it with an open mind and accept it for what it is, I think you'll love it and be enriched by it as much as I was.

Rating:
Summary: Moving and very real-seeming story
Review: _The Blue Flower_ is the story of the romance of Friedrich von Hardenburg, later famous as the German Romantic poet-novelist-philosopher Novalis, with a 12-year old girl, Sophie Von Kuhn. The story is told in brief chapters, from the points of view of several characters: Hardenburg himself, a female friend who may fancy herself a rival of Sophie's, Hardenburg's sister, Sophie's sister, and so on. The large cast of characters is wonderfully described, each character briefly and accurately limned, and all treated with humor and affection. In addition, details of how life was lived in 18th century Saxony are casually strewn throughout the book, and a very accurate-feeling picture of everyday life, and more importantly, how everyday people thought, is the result.

The main characters are odd but interesting: Fritz von Hardenburg is a young artist with Romantic attitudes: and at the same time realistically a brother and a son, and also a fairly conscientious apprentice salt-mine inspector. Sophie is a 12-year old girl of very little intelligence, and is unsparingly presented as such (indeed, her character is probably treated with less sympathy than any other in the book.)

As far as I can tell, every character in the book (at least every even moderately prominent character) is historical, though it is hard for me to be sure how closely Fitzgerald's characterizations resemble the historical record. Knowledge of the historical events depicted here cast a sort of pall over the events of the novel: we know that Sophie will die very young, and von Hardenburg not much later. (Novalis first became famous for a series of prose poems written in Sophie's memory ("Hymns to the Night"), and his major work, the novel _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_, was left uncompleted at his death.) Despite this pall, the book is funny, engaging, and beautiful in a delicate-seeming fashion.