Bibliography
Jul. 22nd, 2012 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThe Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald
It's not often I'm not particularly impressed by a book, but this would be one of those times, I'm afraid. The concept sounds brilliant; the plot follows young Friedrich von Hardenberg before he adopted the name Novalis, one of the early German Romantic writers who occupied a general orbit around Jena (including people like Schiller, Schlegel, Goethe and so on). The meat of the novel is Friedrich's obsession with the even younger Sophie von Kühn, who is twelve when he meets her, and who he decides to get engaged to because she is his spiritual ideal. Which is a bit problematic from our perspective, but the betrothal goes through when she's fourteen (not that unusual in the social context), only for her to be felled with consumption shortly after her fifteenth birthday.
The novel charts Friedrich's obsession, his attempts to make his career as a state supervisor of the salt works (following after his father), his relationship with his family, his complete indifference to the emotional interest of the niece of the couple with whom he lodges, and his first steps towards his own authorial fame. So there's a lot of interesting potential there... but I'm afraid that I don't think Fitzgerald ever quite gets there. There are some brilliant phrases, some lovely moments of characterisation - but overall, the piece feels rather thin. It's clearly a deliberately minimalist take on the topic, but I'm not won over. I was never convinced by the romance, or by the emotional depth of the characters; I also never really felt I saw the intellectual side of Friedrich that would lead him to become Novalis. I wanted something much more chewy, much richer in terms of historical detail, much deeper. A lot is done in term of historical scene setting with some deft strokes of the brush, I don't want to say otherwise - but this felt as if it went half-way to where it should have gone and let the form get in the way of what the content could do.
It's not often I'm not particularly impressed by a book, but this would be one of those times, I'm afraid. The concept sounds brilliant; the plot follows young Friedrich von Hardenberg before he adopted the name Novalis, one of the early German Romantic writers who occupied a general orbit around Jena (including people like Schiller, Schlegel, Goethe and so on). The meat of the novel is Friedrich's obsession with the even younger Sophie von Kühn, who is twelve when he meets her, and who he decides to get engaged to because she is his spiritual ideal. Which is a bit problematic from our perspective, but the betrothal goes through when she's fourteen (not that unusual in the social context), only for her to be felled with consumption shortly after her fifteenth birthday.
The novel charts Friedrich's obsession, his attempts to make his career as a state supervisor of the salt works (following after his father), his relationship with his family, his complete indifference to the emotional interest of the niece of the couple with whom he lodges, and his first steps towards his own authorial fame. So there's a lot of interesting potential there... but I'm afraid that I don't think Fitzgerald ever quite gets there. There are some brilliant phrases, some lovely moments of characterisation - but overall, the piece feels rather thin. It's clearly a deliberately minimalist take on the topic, but I'm not won over. I was never convinced by the romance, or by the emotional depth of the characters; I also never really felt I saw the intellectual side of Friedrich that would lead him to become Novalis. I wanted something much more chewy, much richer in terms of historical detail, much deeper. A lot is done in term of historical scene setting with some deft strokes of the brush, I don't want to say otherwise - but this felt as if it went half-way to where it should have gone and let the form get in the way of what the content could do.
