The Blue Flower
Penelope Fitzgerald
From the reviews of The Blue Flower:
‘A minor miracle of sympathy and crispness’
Adam Mars-Jones, Guardian
‘An extraordinary imagining … an original masterpiece’
Hermione Lee, Financial Times
‘The Blue Flower is an utterly gripping and involving novel which lingers long in the mind. I know of no contemporary writer who more exactly fulfils the brief which Lord Grey of Fallodon drafted apropos of Jane Austen (‘‘With all these limitations you are to write, not only one novel, but several, which … shall be classed among the first rank of the novels written in your language in your country’’).
‘So how does she do it? Is it the style? To an extent, yes, but not in any obvious way. The prose is rapid, plain and unassuming, with a fondness for dry wit and familiar allocutions. There is little imagery and no recondite vocabulary. Obliquity, timing, and the virtues of omission and allusion are her secrets. Paragraphing bears no obvious relation to temporal or spatial co-ordinates. We flit from one point of time, one view and place, with the nonchalance of a ministering yet invisible spirit.
‘These are, in a sense, negative virtues, and this may be the key to the mystery. How many historical novelists seem to view the past like someone scanning a brochure of Tuscan villasina grey November, asa foreign country where they do things not just differently but more interestingly? And when real historical figures with a known fate and stature are involved, how hard not to fall into the fallacy of assuming that they and their contemporaries were either aware of or wholly unconcerned about the figures they would cut for us, backlit by the retrospective glow which posterity has bestowed on them. Penelope Fitzgerald does not just step safely through this minefield, she makes of it a dance arena in which not only the central characters but all their numerous siblings, relatives and friends come to tumultuous and convincing life. Her past is as present, this being as ‘‘unbearably light’’, its search for meaning as urgent and provisional, as our own.’
Michael Dibdin, Independent on Sunday
‘There are twenty perfectly competent novelists at work in Britain today, but only a handful producing what one could plausibly call works of literature. Of this handful, Penelope Fitzgerald possesses what one can only call the purest imagination. Her limpid, exact prose reflects an unwaveringly clear view of the human predicament. She seems to be one of those rare artists gifted with both the knowledge of how things are, and the skill to record what she knows with subtlety and devastating truthfulness.’
A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard
‘The tension between Fitzgerald’s cool and the alien turbulence of most of her characters adds piquancy … each one, however briefly he or she appears, is as visible and audible as the twigs scraping the windows. Fitzgerald tells you what they eat (goose, eel, cabbage, plums), what they read (if they read), and what they think about the French Revolution. It is fastidious, funny, sad, clever and very engaging.’
Gabriele Annan, TLS
‘She is an intelligent writer, superbly and unfailingly so. But her dry wit is also allied to a great talent for emotional sympathy. The disappointment of Karoline Just … is as terrible and as penetratingly understood as the humiliation of Chekhov’s Varya rummaging for galoshes while the cherry orchard changes hands. A wise and funny novel.’
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times
‘The life of Fritz von Hardenberg, the German romantic poet Novalis, might not seem a likely subject for Fitzgerald’s ironic gift. In fact, the cool examination of the poet’s grotesque family, all the minute historical details which are never laboured and always convincing, and the unsentimental, moving account of Fritz’s slightly absurd passions are all very beautifully done. Fitzgerald never seemsto try too hard; she never bullies the reader, but her dry, small-scale prose manages to produce large-scale emotional effects.’
Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday
‘The Blue Flower is a model of what historical fiction can be at its best – when the radical otherness of other times is not merely acknowledged but made integral to the fictional experience. It's also Fitzgerald at her best – elegant, inventive, hilarious, unsparing. I adore this book.’
Jonathan Franzen
Contents
PREFACE BY HERMIONE LEE, ADVISORY EDITOR
5. THE HISTORY OF FREIHERR HEINRICH VON HARDENBERG
7. THE FREIHERR AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
9. AN INCIDENT IN STUDENT LIFE