The Book Beat reading group selection for August is The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. Our discussion will be held Wednesday, August 30 at 7:00 PM online via Zoom. A Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are in stock now and discounted 15%. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe among the small towns and great universities of 18th-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father’s permission to wed his “heart’s heart,” his “spirit’s guide”–a plain, simple child named Sophievon Kühn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be?
Their rationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one’s own fate– these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor.
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
“An astonishing book…Fitzgerald’s greatest triumph.“–New York Times Book Review
“Like the masterpiece it is, The Blue Flower ranges far beyond itself. It is an interrogation of life, love, purpose, experience and horizons, which has found its perfect vehicle in a few years from the pitifully short life of a German youth about to become a great poet — one living in a period of intellectual and political upheaval, when even the prevailing medical orthodoxy “held that to be alive was not a natural state.” –Michael Hoffman for The New York Times
“The Blue Flower is a mysterious short book, as well as a completely realised one. Fritz’s family life, his work as a tax collector for the salt mines, his philosophical education, the story of the woman who silently loves him, his romantic passion for the naive Sophie, who dies a cruel death, and the landscape of his everyday life are vividly printed on our minds. But his visionary dream of a blue flower that can never be found haunts the book like a half-remembered tune.” —Book of a Lifetime: The Blue Flower The Independent, UK
Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of nine novels, three of which – The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels – were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. It won America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership.
A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers – a study of her remarkable father Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and his equally remarkable brothers.
Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences.
She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.