The Blue Flower

By: Penelope Fitzgerald, Candia McWilliam - introduction

Narrated by: Thomas Judd, Stephanie Racine

Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ comes this unusual romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie, newly introduced by Candia McWilliam.

The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father’s permission to announce his engagement to his heart’s desire: twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?

Tracing the dramatic early years of the young German who was to become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, ‘The Blue Flower’ is a masterpiece of invention, evoking the past with a reality that we can almost feel.

©1995 Penelope Fitzgerald; Introduction Candia McWilliam 2013; Preface Hermione Lee 2013 (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

‘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

‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks

‘Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer.’ David Nicholls

‘An enchanting novel about heart, body and mind. The writing is ellipitical and witty… so that what could be a sad little love story is constantly funny and always absorbing. This novel is a jewel.’ Carmen Callil, Daily Telegraph

‘Her sense of time and place is marvellously deft, done in a few words. She knows how they all walked, eased their old joints. She knows the damp smell of decay of the ancient schlosses. In a bare little book she reveals a country and an age as lost as Tolstoy’s Russia and which we seem somehow always to have known.’ Jane Gardam, Spectator

‘Detail, expertly dabbed in, provides a substantial background for the story of a poet which, it is subtly suggested, is also the story of a remarkable moment in the history of civilisation… It is hard to see how the hopes and defeats of Romanticism, or the relation between inspiration and common life, between genius and mere worthiness, could be more deftly rendered than they are in this remarkable novel.’ Frank Kermode, LRB

When Historical Fiction Becomes Literature

Judd manages to do justice to Fitzgerald's immaculate prose, which is not easy. The story is a classic, and the work of one the best writers in English. The characters, which range from a small child, to a teenage girl, to an elderly Saxon patriarch, are all performed convincingly and with dramatic verisimilitude. The Blue Flower is a book you will listen to more than once.

Perfect

I was worried from other reviews I read that the book would be obscure or confusing and hard to follow or fully enjoy. But I found the book completely fascinating. Not just for the way it vividly captured the time and place in a way that felt authentic and eye opening, or for the absolutely beautiful and poetic passages, that I expected out of fitzgerald, having read The Bookshop already, but also for the captivating and entertaining story and wonderfully rendered characters. This story totally possessed my heart and mind and even, dare I say, soul. Alongside the likes of Anna Karenina, Lolita, this was an extremely rare case of a book that seemed to me perfectly executed in every possible way down to the smallest detail.

A COLOSSAL BORE

A tale full of precocious children and irritating adolescents, all rendered (with the exception of the characters' voices) in a relentlessly sing-song narration. Seriously not worth the effort. The overblown introduction is even more outrageously ridiculous and pretentious than the novel itself. Avoid at all costs.