The Blue Flower

Penelope Fitzgerald

The Booker Committee finally honored Fitzgerald with a prize in 1995 for The Blue Flower, her retelling of the early life of celebrated Romantic poet Novalis. Finally, after a string of books that left the reader wanting more, Fitzgerald expands her spare prose style to give us enough.

Fritz von Hardenburg, later Novalis, is a poet and philosopher who is expected to go into the family business if inspecting salt mines. A thrilling job for a poet, of course, and his academic colleagues are quite horrified. But, good son that he is, he accepts the charge with aplomb and goes to apprentice at the house of Coelestin Just, an accountant (from the way his duties are described, we'd likely call him an auditor today) who travels from mansion to mansion making sure the books are in order. While accompanying him one day, von Hardenburg meets Sophie von Kuhn, described by von Hardenburg's associates as a dullard (again, translating into the modern, an airhead; Fitzgerald makes gestures towards the idea that Sophie is slightly mentally retarded, but never actually comes out and says it, and her behavior is delightfully ambiguous in this regard), and is instantly captivated with her. Modern readers of this tale will probably be more incensed at the age difference (when they meet, Fritz is nineteen, Sophie twelve) than the difference in mental capacity, while the families themselves couldn't seem to care less about a nineteen-year-old suitor for a twelve-year-old girl. (One thinks, perhaps, with a jaundiced eye, that Ms. Fitzgerald may be subtly comparing Novalis' time to ours, and finding ours wanting.)

Fitzgerald's books are usually minimal in both style and plot, and in The Blue Flower, less actually happens than in most of her novels. Such is the peril of biography, even when fictionalized. At the core, our lives are pretty much boring. And apprenticing to be a salt mine inspector? Few things could possibly be more boring. Fitzgerald keeps the book strong not only with her usual spare style, but also by switching back and forth between viewpoints so that we're not always stuck with Fritz and his books. We do get some scenes of such, though, and the effect is amusing rather than dull, as Fritz, for example, reads from a book of laws on salt mining as he would a book of Goethe's poetry. And, of course, being a Romantic poet, von Hardenburg's work is unintentionally (one assumes) hilarious of itself. The overall effect is that of great amusement; not that this is a light novel, per se, but there is always at least a shadow of satire surrounding it, even within the tragedy.

Honestly, despite all the above, I had a hard time figuring out if I actually liked the novel or not. It does drag in places, though I put that down to my expectation, when reading Fitzgerald, of finding a hundred fifty pages instead of two hundred fifty. And I had a hard time telling, at times, whether the humor was intentional or unintentional; it's impossible to tell whether Ms. Fitzgerald actually likes Novalis or whether she's satirizing him. But overall, the book isn't a bad one. Fitzgerald has certainly done better (The Bookshop, passed over for the Booker, is the best of her novels I've read to date), but for the reader who has already sampled and enjoyed Fitzgerald, there is a good deal to be liked here.