The Blue Flower

The Blue Flower opens amid the confusions of washday in a noble Saxon household in the 1790s, and it never raises its voice above that domestic pitch while telling one of the strangest love stories in European literature. Fritz von Hardenberg, who will become the poet Novalis, is twenty two, a student of Fichte and Schiller at Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg, and the son of a pious, hard pressed father who directs the Saxon salt mines and has had to sell estates and move the family to a modest town house. In 1794 Fritz sees Sophie von Kühn standing at a window. She is twelve. Something happened to me, he says, and he decides on the spot that she is his wisdom and his future wife. Sophie is plain, barely educated, and beneath the Hardenbergs socially, and Fitzgerald is very funny about the family's bewilderment: one brother is repelled to find that illness has left her bald, while the youngest, the boy they call the Bernhard, grasps something about Fritz's devotion that the adults cannot. His father, unnerved by the French Revolution, allows the engagement a year later. Then Sophie falls ill with consumption and dies a few days after her fifteenth birthday.

The title comes from a story Fritz is writing, in which a young man longs for a blue flower he cannot stop imagining. He reads the draft aloud and asks his listeners what the flower means, and the novel refuses to answer for him. Fitzgerald ends by following the family past the story's edge: the Bernhard drowned young, and Fritz, engaged again, wished for death and died of the same disease before he was thirty.

The book is about 225 pages, and Frank Kermode called its main narrative fragmentary and rather distanced, its allusions to philosophy, medicine, and agriculture unobtrusively certain, and its design something for the reader to make or discern. Kirkus found it touching, funny, and unflinchingly tragic, and Michael Hofmann in the New York Times called it a quite astonishing book. It rewards slow reading and a second go, and it suits anyone who likes a historical novel that trusts them to do some of the work.