Customer Reviews

The blue flower.

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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.

The reviewer who wrote you either love this book or hate it is right. Those who hate it seem to do so because it did not live up to their preconceived notions of what "a great book" should be. Obvious plot development, blatant character growth, a quick rundown of history ... if those are the only reasons you read, definitely don't get this book. I thought it was a light, wonderful collection of vignettes that brought the world of late 18th century Germany to life. *But* I wasn't reading to see how Sophie would develop into a girl worthy of a great poet's love. At the risk of sounding like a snobby "real" reviewer, let me recommend the kind of readers who will like this book: (in the words of the late Iris Murdoch, another British novelist) "someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, about the moral issues." The key is putting in a little mental effort of your own.

An acquired taste. She's acidic and ruthlessly matter-of-fact. She writes about the German Romantics without the slightest trace of romanticism in her prose.

Her writing is an exercise in hiding. You have to turn over the rocks. This is not a "great read" if by that one thinks of a "page turner." She is not an accessible writer and doesn't try to be.

Nothing actually happens in this book. That annoys a lot of people who seem to think that this is somehow "shallow." This is not a shallow book at all. The reader has to do some of the work, that's all. Historically, this is a strange and unaccustomed area for the American reader. My three star rating is actually very high. I never give fives (OK, to a musical group I like) so four is tops. Three is really good. (I wish we could give half-stars).

It might help to read some other Penelope Fitz books first. "Offshore," is one of my favorites. Blue Flower is not for everyone.

EKW

"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.

"I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

The quote above appeared in a story about Penelope Fitzgerald written just after her death. The quote and the ideas it states appear to be very appropriate to "The Blue Flower". I have read two other works of hers "The Bookshop" and "The Golden Child". All three books share her wonderful style of writing, which she can modify to produce three very different books, all the while maintaining the quality of her writing, while demonstrating incredible range.

Of the three I have read this work is the one she makes you work the hardest for. The two previous books laid out their stories in comfortable, familiar settings, both in place and time. The books were constructed so the reader was able to follow a distinct story line. In the case of "The Blue Flower" the story, and her method of telling it leaves the reader to fill in the details necessary to make the story flow in a more conventional manner, to read more easily, more comfortably. For those who want all the details, all the motivation of the characters detailed and laid out with a beginning, middle, and end, this work may not rate as one of their favorite works.

This book was comparatively lengthy set side by side with the other books I have mentioned. The briefer works are very straightforward, and I commented when I wrote about "The Bookshop" that I was curious with what she would do with the added length. True to having been not only a brilliant and highly original Authoress, as the length of her work expanded, it became more complex, less apparent, but yet another phenomenal read.

It is astounding that a novel barely longer than two-hundred pages can create this many characters one cares deeply about, even more astonishing considering how distant a bunch of late 18th century Germans would seem in the hands of any lesser novelist. I've never read a book this short that had the same emotional impact - and was so unsentimental. The last page, essentially just a list, is one of the most powerful sections of prose I've ever read, simply because it contains the weight of all the perfectly written pages, and complete human beings, that went before it. A beautiful, sad, funny, moving book.

one of my favorite books and the reason, i think, is simple. this book is not about plot, is not a character study, and is not a morality play, really. i don't think its purpose is any one of these; it's purpose is something else altogether, a pleasure of an entirely different sort. re-read the first few pages and something occurs to you--there's something very odd here, something off- kilter about the syntax of the sentences, about the flow of the ideas. you either love the book or hate it after the first few pages. for those of us who loved it, we could see, hear really, the seventeenth-century german talking; the clunky, awkward, verbose beauty of it all. what is extraordinary about this book is that penelope fitzgerald, in a feat of sustained imagination i boggle at, has written a book as it would have been written and imagined some four centuries ago. it's like discovering a book written by novalis, not just about him.

This book is amazing. Fitzgerald built this entire book on actual historical documents. Every chapter relates to a letter, journal entry or some other historical document/artifact. She does everything possible to bring you into the world of Novalis, before he was Novalis. Her use of the German language inside of English was masterful. If you want to know how some of the German translates http://dict.leo.org/ is the best free tool out there. Some times the effect of it being pieced together is felt. You find yourself wanting more, and the scene switches. This itself is part of here pure genius. The entire book is about longing. What better tribute could be made to Novalis, perhaps the greatest poet of the German Romantic. The Blue Flower, the ultimate symbol of longing.

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.

A great short read - as rare and wonderful as the flora of the title. Ms. Fitzgerald creates the family environment, society, education and general circumstances of a young man destined to become a great poet of the German era of the period of Goethe (the great man himself makes an appearance in the tale). The eccentric, precocious, intensive perceptions of the sensitive young man coming of age, struggling between wisdom and understanding, love and faith. Like any great work of art, it reflects life's mysteries - what is the basis of love and life? The fact that we can never know heightens the sense of tragedy and pathos - the explanation for Fritz's quote in the end "All things considered, I think I'd rather be dead". An excellent, introspective work, great characterizations, dramatic in the mind's workings.