The Blue Flower: A Novel

This is a Bildungsroman about Friedrich von Hardenberg, son of an impoverished aristocrat, whose poetry, published under the name Novalis, would come to define the mystical side of German Romanticism, a quest for an ideal harmony of man and nature symbolized by the Blue Flower. But Fitzgerald merely hints at the poet's later (but short) life in this lean, succinct book. Instead she shows him at home with his strict religious father and many siblings, impressing his professors at Jena with his curiosity about the latest thinking in seemingly every field, living with the family of a regional magistrate to study administration, making friendships, and falling in love. This love for a girl who is only twelve when he meets her is so absolute on his part, so little motivated on hers, that it becomes the embodiment of his philosophy of the ideal: that the qualities of an object of desire depend more on the beliefs of the beholder than on what it may be in itself.Ultimately, the book is about that ideal, or about the notion of reaching towards a romantic ideal, the blue flower, the distant horizon. But the Blue Flower of the title is only mentioned two or three times, in a quotation from the opening of Novalis' unfinished novel HEINRICH VON OFTERDINGEN. Fitzgerald knows that to establish the horizon, one first has to map the ground at one's feet. (This is especially true of Novalis, whose romanticism was not an escape from the real world, but a belief that everything in it -- human beings, animals, plants, even the rocks -- might communicate with one another on an equal footing.) Much of the book is concerned with daily life and domestic details, but its first impression can be disorientating. Fitzgerald writes in a clean but curious style that seems at times like an awkward translation from German (the definite article before some people's names, for instance, or the use of "maiden" instead of "girl"); oblique references to Kant and other thinkers of the day are tossed in but never explained. The reader is plunged into life in full spate, a busy repetitive life where the details of daily routine serve as ballast to flights of intellectual enquiry. But the strangeness wears off, the writing simplifies, and the book's ultimate effect is to give the stamp of absolute authenticity to everything that the author describes.This is not a conventional love-story, or indeed a conventional novel in any sense, although it is filled with memorable people. Ideas are sketched in with a few deft strokes, then left suspended. The author assumes that readers have either a good knowledge of the political and intellectual history of those watershed times, or that they can pursue these things on their own. She does not use the novel as a means of explaining history, let alone an aesthetic, but attempts a much more daring task: making you experience it at first hand -- even without quite knowing what you are experiencing. Perhaps a bit disappointing at first, this turns out to be a depth-charge of a book that stirs the mind long after the ripples of reading it have disappeared.

The Blue Flower starts in 1794 as Frederich “Fritz” Hardenberg, the German poet and philosopher who in four years time will take the pen name Novalis, is twenty-two years old and has graduated from university. At his father’s urging, he undergoes an apprenticeship in tax collection and business management in order to work as a clerk in the salt mining industry. It is that year that he meets Sophie von Kühn, the young girl (girl being the active word) who will become his fiancée and will forever own his heart.The Blue Flower chronicles two years in the life of Fritz Hardenberg and his family (1794-1796), though it goes back in time to provide a picture of his parents and siblings up to the year 1794. Easy to read, though dense at times despite the small page count, The Blue Flower is occasionally funny courtesy of the family dynamics.Out of the three Fitzgerald novels I have read in quick succession, namely The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, and The Blue Flower, this one is my least favorite. It has good moments though; the depictions of Fritz and Sophie’s engagement soirée, for example, was very vivid. I could picture the lighting, feel the ambience and hear the music as if I had been present. The descriptions of the Hardenbergs, especially the Bernhard’s antics, and the lavish Rockenthien dinners were also crisply rendered, but aside from those moments, this novel didn’t manage to be memorable beyond the page.I suppose that me not being aware of Friedrich Hardenberg before reading The Blue Flower could have been a contributing factor for not engaging much with his character, but I have read other novels in which I didn’t know anything in advance about the main subject (or his ouvre) yet I ended up liking them; Thomas Mann in The Magician and Henry James in The Master, both written by Colm Toibin, are two very good examples.Overall, The Blue Flower has merits, but is my least favorite among the three Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels I have read thus far.

Covering the 1790s in Germany, “The Blue Flower” is a fictional treatment of Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Fritz, who later evolves to become the poet Novalis. The story focuses on twenty-two-year-old Fritz who becomes enchanted with the twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn and asks for her hand in marriage. No one can understand the attraction. Fritz is educated and comes from a family of substance, whereas Sophie is termed a dullard without means or money. Fritz’s quest to finish writing a story about a sublime blue flower serves as a leitmotif. However, Fritz’s desire to write a story about the blue flower is never brought to fruition. The reader is left guessing as to what the blue flower signifies—its meaning is intentionally left an unfinished puzzle. And yet as a metaphor, the riddle of the blue flower is obvious. Fritz’s passion for Sophie reveals his true calling to become a man of letters and philosophy, the great German Romantic poet Novalis. There is always a place for a small book that tells a larger story, but this story suffers from a dearth of details, the lack of the rich tapestry that the reader needs to be transported to an epic time in history, when Goethe lived and exerted great influence. Author Penelope Fitzgerald leaves out overmuch, making if difficult for the reader to connect with the story’s historical context or with its huge cast of characters, some as flat as wallpaper. Even the appearance of the great man himself, Goethe is not fully fleshed-out or credible.

If ever there is a book to persevere with, to have patience with, and to go back and re-read again, it is ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald. When I bought it, I didn’t realize it was the last novel by the Booker prize winner; published five years before her death in 2000 aged 83. For someone about to read it, it can seem a trifle intimidating. Set in 18th century Germany, Fitzgerald tells her imagining of the teenage story of real German poet and philosopher Fritz von Hardenberg, later called Novalis. He is a young man so self-contained, so absorbed in his thoughts, that I wondered where the drama would arise. But it does, because he falls in love.‘The Blue Flower’ is a short novel, 223 pages. The chapters are concise [mostly only two or three pages each] and this encouraged me to ‘just read another’ and so, gradually, almost without realizing, I fell into the story. Fitzgerald recreates this particular time in German history with a delicacy that, despite the language and sometimes confusing names, makes the people become real.It is 1794 and Fritz, an idealistic and passionate student of philosophy and writer of poems, stays with some family friends and meets their youngest daughter, Sophie von Kühn. Love is instant for Fritz and, despite a little bemusement on the part of Sophie, and astonishment by his siblings and friends, he proves himself constant.It is the sort of novel that, when you are reading it you ‘get’ it but afterwards, when trying to describe it to someone else, you struggle to grasp it. I still do not really understand the meaning of the blue flower. But although the deeper meaning may elude me, there are passages I love. Particularly the opening chapter when a guest arrives at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse; it is washday, the annual occasion for washing personal and household linen, and his arrival effects an introduction to the household. This starts a juxtaposition which runs throughout the novel, of the ordinary everyday mundanity of life alongside Fritz’s poetic sensibilities. He calls twelve-year old Sophie his Philosophy, his guardian spirit. Knowing he must wait for her, he trains as an official in the salt mines and Fitzgerald treats us to some of the practicalities and science of this industry.This is not a lazy read. Be prepared to invest something into it yourself. Fitzgerald does not put it all onto the page, she expects the reader to think, to research, to work it out, as she did when writing. If each book is the visible bit of an iceberg above the waterline, with the research submerged, ‘The Blue Flower’ is the snowball on top of the iceberg.

Penelope Fitzgerald is not the easiest novelist to read - she does not spoon feed you with full details of every character and sub-plot in her tale and it is left to your imagination to flesh out the story sometimes. This book is based on a real character - Fritz Hardenberg - who later became famous under the pen name of 'Novalis'. A poet and philosopher with a brilliant mind, he studied in the late 18th century, in Jena and Leipzig and various other places in Saxony, learning from the likes of Fichte, Schlagel and other well-known philosophers of the time. This is a story based on the real facts of his having met and fallen in love with a very young (12) girl who he immediately knows that he wishes to marry. The story tracks the progress of Fritz' love affair from beginning to end, spanning a period of about 2 years.This is a novel so of course the author has placed words in the mouths of the characters and gives us a picture of Fritz and his life among his family and friends. Some of the descriptive passages are wonderful, for instance drawing a picture of the rumbustious and chaotic household that Sophie, his great love, lives with. Fritz' own family are much more sober - his father positively dour - and his poor mother struggles to assert herself while his siblings vary between sensible and loyal, with the youngest brother being rather tiresome and out of control.The book is written in a slightly curious style in order to give the flavour of the German background but this is valid and helps to set the scene though some might find it mildly irritating. Fitzgerald never states the obvious, leaving the reader to do some of the work which makes it rather more interesting - this is a really good book for a book club to discuss. In this particular edition, there is an introduction that I would suggest reading after you read the book, rather than before, as it is erudite and rather wordy.

One could call this lovely novel a tragic comedy, if it were not so unbalanced: it starts funny and ends sadly.A mildly mocking look at one of the saints of German romantic literature. Friedrich von Hardenberg, aka Novalis, was an unworldly dreamer, a naive chatterbox, and had, by modern standards, an inclination towards pedophilia, though he seems to have practiced restraint. The story of his life is a tragic one, with much consumption affecting key people. Both he and his childish fiancée died too young. (A list of famous writers who died of consumption would be quite long.)He wrote a classic book of the romantic school, the novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which popularized the symbol of the blue flower. That stood vaguely for the elusive goal of love and longing etc. It gave Ms. Fitzgerald her book title.Personally, I don't have a high opinion of Novalis and his teacher, the idealist philosopher Fichte. I think that, in all their enthusiastic innocence, they were intellectual great-uncles of darker things to come in Germany. Their stance was anti-scientific and anti- enlightened.The story: we are in Germany at the end of the 18th century, in Saxony/Thuringia, with Goethe, Schiller, Fichte and other stars giving appearances. Novalis comes from a large family of religious and modest aristocrats. He is the eldest son. He struggles a little with his strict father about his career choice, as many young men do. (Father wins and Fritz becomes a practical man, a salt mining inspector.) There is much doubt and debate about his intention to marry a 12 year old girl with not quite equal social status. She falls seriously ill.The author handles the time, the place, and the society admirably. While the book's editing of German language bits and pieces is not fail safe, some German idiomatic habits are nicely carried into English. Example: the habit of calling a boy 'der Bernhard', or a married woman 'die Mandelsloh'. That becomes 'the Bernhard' and 'the Mandelsloh', and makes me feel at home. Is 'gracious lady' an adequate translation of 'gnädige Frau' though? It does sound surprising.

Over the years I have heard or seen the occasional person RAVING about this book, and saying things like "If there's one book you have to read before you die, then this is it!".Well, that is SO not the case. Even halfway through it, I could not understand why the raving! Even three quarters of the way through, there was still no reason to rave! Only at the very end did I see some merit, but not much, in this book.BE WARNED! Fitzgerald thought it would be interesting to paint a picture in fictional form of the history of the 18th century German writer known as "Novalis". Was his life extraordinarily interesting then? NO. He, of high-born lineage, simply developed a passion for a much younger woman of low-born stock, seeing in her some sort of purity and simplicity that held philosophical allure for him. (This philosophical allure is unfortunately never fully described or evidenced in Fitzgerald's account, and we are forced to imagine that it simply existed.) She, his love, however, became ill, required an operation, and died. And that's it. In essence, that's the plot.On opening this book I found that that the first half dozen pages shoved ravings in my face. I didn't read them. (I will make my own judgements, thank you!) Then after these rave reviews there follows a long gushing and adulatory essay on Fitzgerald and "The Blue Flower" by Candia McWilliams. That too I deliberately did not read. Instead I started in on the work itself. And I was bored rigid.But for some interesting period details, this book was almost a total waste of eight or nine hours of my life. READERS BEWARE.

I read this short novel because I heard two people praising it in the last week. It is a regular on book club lists and The Observer said it is in the top ten of historical novels. But I found it dull and pointless. My taste runs to action and purpose rather than the slow life and lovely descriptions. I don't say that I am right at all - but that we all have different tastes. This is partly about what love means to some of us - as shown in the way that German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (who died aged 29 in 1801) fell in love with a 12-year old when he was 22. The book is based very closely on the details of real life and real people. Actually, I didn't ever take to that over tale of young love, Romeo and Juliet. Portrayals of love are rather sickly to me if there is not much else in the story. In this story, there are other elements - a visit of Goethe, for instance, to the 12-year old (then 14) and descriptions of how people in Saxony, where The Blue Flower is set, reacted to the French Revolution. Actually, looking at other Amazon reviews, this book does provoke a range of reaction. So, it probably depends on your personality and particular taste whether you will enjoy it or not.