Rating: 
Summary: I Tried Believe Me I Tried
Review: When I started The Blue Flower I knew it would not be an easy read. But I survived and enjoyed Human Voices and I needed a thinking book. The plot and characters were excellent. I'm afraid it was my 57 year old brain that has denied The Blue Flower five stars. I simply could not follow all the characters and their different names. I have to ask myself. Was this book just too much for me? Is my brain just a little too addled to remember three names for every character? How depressing.....and to think that I once got through Crime and Punishment...but God Bless You Penelope. You do keep the mind challenged!
Rating: 
Summary: A strange and mysterious work of art
Review: My first set of comments on The Blue Flower didn't make itintoAmazon's reviews. I hope this version does, because even with allthe reviews submitted so far, it seems Fitzgerald's remarkable bookhas still managed to ellude everyone.This is not a novel in the conventional sense. Period. It is not a depiction of the life and times of the German Romantics, it is not the early life of Novalis, is is not just a witty and elusive bit of fluff, though I believe the impression that it is, is absolutely deliberate. What Fitzgerald has managed is a kind of literary miracle, a of novel as pesher. A work that can be read as one thing on the surace, as something very different if you delve deeper and immerse yourself in the work. You can skim or you can dive deep. Fitzgerald gives you the choice. Under the fluff and froth of little girls and silly infatuations and pompous poets is the abjectly tragic story of the women who dream and have their dreams destroyed, who love and have their love go either unaknowledge or unredeemed; who are valued only for their physical form and their percieved purity. The more delicate and witless the better if they are to be treasured, coveted, desired, by a lover. And in the Blue Flower if the lover is male, he is really no lover at all. There is the carnal pleasaure and gratification a man can exact from a wife, or the endless line of children a woman is bound to conceive for him; but there is no real love in the Blue Flower except from woman to woman, female friend to female friend. And it is not joyous, liberating or enthralling love. There is nothing Romantic about it. Is there any passage more poignant and painful than the mother's brief scene in the garden? This is a book about a Romantic age dominated by men who prattled on about feelings and their senses and the anquish and ecstasty of their profoundest love, but who, on the whole, proved to be consumate narcissists who only recognized a woman as desirable if she were the embodiement of some nubile, pre-sexual ideal they yearned to take and covet and ultimately destroy. I have no idea how Fitzgerald managed to create this novel: part dandelion dander; part profoundest tragedy; but she did, and she deserves every award and kudo she gets.
Rating:
Summary: don't read it on an airplane (though I did)
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald has proven write tightly plotted mysteries, e.g., The Golden Child. Thus I think it unfair to criticize this book for being an odd construction. Read it if you're in the mood to read a historical novel that makes no attempt to teach anything about history. The Blue Flower is a great demonstration of the writer's craft, which is probably why the eggheads on the Booker Prize committee liked it so much.
Rating: 
Summary: Most perfect English-language novel since "The Great Gatsby"
Review: This novel is so beautiful and fresh-water clear that words fail me. It creates a world with a remarkably small number of brush strokes...when readers find it slight or simple, they are telling us more about themselves than about this book. As I grow older, perhaps I will use this book as a test, giving a copy to new acquaintances (I've already given away several) to draw a reaction. For me, anyone who dismisses this book as dull or minor could not be worth an acquaintance in the years remaining to me. Critics have debased adjectives, and much of our language. Let me say only that this is a truly ravishing book. A masterpiece!
Rating: 
Summary: Yet another pretentious Booker choice
Review: Seriously folks, if the Booker Prize panel hadn't chosen this as a winner, would it have received such favorable worldwide reviews? This book is really an extremely slight novel masquerading as a serious piece of literature. I read it all the way through only because I couldn't believe that it was really going to continue being so bad--it never improved! A HUGE disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: history not historical fiction
Review: one of my favorite books and the reason, i think, is simple. this book is not about plot, is not a character study, and is not a morality play, really. i don't think its purpose is any one of these; it's purpose is something else altogether, a pleasure of an entirely different sort. re-read the first few pages and something occurs to you--there's something very odd here, something off- kilter about the syntax of the sentences, about the flow of the ideas. you either love the book or hate it after the first few pages. for those of us who loved it, we could see, hear really, the seventeenth-century german talking; the clunky, awkward, verbose beauty of it all. what is extraordinary about this book is that penelope fitzgerald, in a feat of sustained imagination i boggle at, has written a book as it would have been written and imagined some four centuries ago. it's like discovering a book written by novalis, not just about him.
Rating:
Summary: Its funny to see that people either love or hate this book..
Review: The Blue Flower is a sad and funny book. Ms. Fitzgerald has written a wonderful novel besides her other one named Offshore, in "The Blue Flower", she has created a character to explore the meaning of love & loss, poetry and life. This book contains fierce intelligence and perceptive characterization-a must read I must say... its not easy to understand this book, but once you do, you'd enjoy this book as much as I did =)
Rating: 
Summary: The Blue Flower
Review: This book was not as interesting as I thought it would be the characters were not as exciting. The characters in the story were easy to relate to, but there could have been more drama, and more exciting things happening. The story is very boring at first then towards the middle there is a little excitement, but still not enough.
Rating:
Summary: Dull, dull, dull
Review: There I was, trapped on a train, with nothing to read but this book. The reviews had been favorable, so I dove in. Conclusion: it was mind-numbing, with characters who just weren't interesting. I've read 1000 page novels that flowed more quickly and evoked deeper introspection than this one. Clearly, I just didn't get it.
Rating:
Summary: A truly great novel
Review: Fitzgerald is a genius, and this book is a consummate work of art. I felt profoundly inspired and breathless with excitement the whole way through and could not bear to put it down for any reason. Such restrained intelligence, fierce compassion and depth of worldly understanding come along all too rarely.
| 
