The Blue Flower

Penelope Lively’s last published book before her death in 2000 is a spare, elegant and unusual novel set in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century.

The story is based upon the life of the romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the name Novalis, but Lively has written much more than a fictionalised biography of the man.

Fritz is one member of a very large family, living in a perpetual state of genteel poverty and deep thought, whose relations populate the book with their own idiosyncratic characteristics. When, in his twenties, he falls in love with thirteen-year-old Sophie von Kuhn, he knows he must marry her, despite the consternation of his family to this union.

The remarkable thing about this book is how much it contains in so few words. It is almost as if Lively wrote a 500-page book and then erased half of it. Not a word is wasted, and yet entire images are conjured up: the annual washday at the Hardenberg household (‘great dingy snowfalls of sheets’); Fritz’s precocious youngest brother (‘“As to Bernhard, you must remember that not all children are child-like.”’); silent breakfast-times, punctuated by coffee mugs being slammed down on the wooden table with cries of 'Satt!'; and Sophie’s illness, borne stoically and bravely.

The Blue Flower is so good in this way that it almost doesn’t matter whether you are interested in the subject matter and the setting. It is a most amazing piece of writing for its own sake and well worth reading for this alone.