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Summary: From an investment banker in New York
Review: This is a great novel. One should not read it - or rate it - based on such things as plot and level of adrenaline it produces. There are many other reasons for reading a novel. One of them is language. The other is ideas. The lines in this book are often delicious. The thoughts - deep and complex in their exploration of very fundamental values - are so neatly packaged in such a thin volume!!! She minces no words and yet manages to convey, with her masterful strokes, the feelings and realities of the times. Penelope Fitzgerald brings us a most refreshing style of writing, and brings some very important questions to the forefront. This is a highly recommended book for true lovers of great literature.
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Summary: Boring...do not buy it
Review: This book was one of the dullest I have read. The characters are uninteresting, and the story tedious, Despite what other reviews have said, the book did not make me think about any deeper issues. other than the time and money I lost on it. Frankly, there is nothing in it worth remembering. I only have thrown away two books in my life; this is one of them.
Rating: 
Summary: Did not like it
Review: I kept reading this hoping for something to redeem this book, but never found it.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the effort
Review: I enjoyed this book, even though I started out with the assumption that it appears many reviewers did: that this would be an easy quick read, with a love story. It is definitely not that, but I found it to be much more. I enjoy the challenge of reading a novel in which every plot detail is not laid out and every character's feelings and motivations are not spelled out in each chapter. I enjoyed Fitzgerald's dialogue between characters, very intelligent and witty. Also, to me it did not matter what Fritz saw in Sophie, what was important was that he was enamored and how that affected him.
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Summary: I just didn't get it
Review: I wanted to like this book. I knew it would be a hard read and was up for the challenge. I just didn't like it very much. After reading one of the amazon reader reviews, I feel I have a little better understanding of the book, but it still didn't do much for me.
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Summary: Penelope is like retsina
Review: An acquired taste. She's acidic and ruthlessly matter-of-fact. She writes about the German Romantics without the slightest trace of romanticism in her prose. Her writing is an exercise in hiding. You have to turn over the rocks. This is not a "great read" if by that one thinks of a "page turner." She is not an accessible writer and doesn't try to be. Nothing actually happens in this book. That annoys a lot of people who seem to think that this is somehow "shallow." This is not a shallow book at all. The reader has to do some of the work, that's all. Historically, this is a strange and unaccustomed area for the American reader. My three star rating is actually very high. I never give fives (OK, to a musical group I like) so four is tops. Three is really good. (I wish we could give half-stars). It might help to read some other Penelope Fitz books first. "Offshore," is one of my favorites. Blue Flower is not for everyone. EKW
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Summary: comment on non-personal German Romanticism
Review: "The Blue Flower" is a comment on German Romanticism (Novalis was a famous Romantic poet), primarily addressing two characteristics: 1. that the highest experience is the "weltschmerz" of Goethe, the melancholy loneliness achieved by uniting oneself to non-personal nature; 2. that the child (the primitive, the noble savage -Rousseau) who achieves this union naturally is to be elevated to an ideal. As a matter of fact the book is patterned on Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which sparked the German Romantic movement and in fact was blamed for the suicide of many of its readers. In the melancholy loneliness of union with the non-personal deity, nature, there is no difference between life and death. Suicide is embraced as a melding with nature- the Bernhard walks into the water and both he and Fritz want to die. In the 18th c. due in large part to the success of Newton and other scientists, non-personal nature had started to replace the personal God. The philosophy of science derives from British empiricism - nothing can be known except through experience and all knowledge must be tested against the individual entity. Novalis and the German Romantics objected to the resulting mechanical image of the world brought on by science. They were steeped in and shaped by the philosophy of the great German thinker, Kant, who wrote in response to the Scottish empiricist, Hume. Kant proposes that our minds and our knowledge of the external world are not separate things but are one, turning the emphasis away from the reality of the objective external entity. For Kant our knowledge of the world reflects more about the structure of the mind than it tells us of the outside world, so he speaks of something like sieves in the mind - space/time, cause/effect - which sift our experience and mold our impressions. The subjective, self-conscious becomes the primary source of reality. Followers of Kant like Fichte, who taught Novalis, carried this to the extreme and became pure mentalists. For them reality results from the struggles of the inner self-conscious; the individual entity does not even exist (Kant never went this far). The German Romantics are closely allied to this philosophy in its emphasis on the subjective self-conscious creating reality. But Novalis also criticizes the mentalists for leaving no room for love, emotions, feelings. He sought to harmonize the inner, subjective self-conscious with nature which had become a mechanical clock of mechanical parts. The Romantics felt that primitive man or the child had an immediate relation to nature, a certain oneness, but the 18th c. man of feeling had been alienated from nature. In the tradition of Kant their emphasis was on the inner self-conscious and they turned inward to poetry and music. The Schlegels and Novalis believed that poetry as metaphor created the fantasy and mythology which would rejoin man to nature. Their new image of the world was the organic flower, rather than the machine. They also had a theory of irony whereby they ridiculed common sense and the expected, traditional way of doing things, in an effort to reveal the inadequacy of reality, thus to destroy it and supplant it with their poetic image. This is basically an egotistical philosophy seeking union of the inner self with a nature devoid of person - to find the blue flower one turns away from family and friends and seeks a "blue" (melancholy) union alone with a rarity of nature. Fritz and the Bernhard in the story are unable to love. Fritz does not really love Sophie nor care about her fulfillment. He would keep her a child. There is perhaps a close identity between this Romanticism and the later philosophy of Existentialism, where the non-personlism of nature becomes the "benign indifference of the universe" and there is no meaning to becoming. Sophie is more a heroine, as she begins to grow as a person ( in relation to other persons), then Fritz is a hero. His brother Erasmus seems to break through the stifling pathos of the era, really loves Sophie and finds joy. The names, Erasmus and Bernhard, by evoking historical characters, become symbolically significant to the theme. The story takes place in post Reformation Germany (Fritz's family belong to a Protestan sect) and it is historically Erasmus of Rotterdam who is Luther's intellectual counterpart and who does not break away from the existing church. Erasmus esteems joy and regrets the lack of it in some of the reformers. The Bernhard's name is a combination of his mother's name and his fathers's. His mother's name Bernardine is ridiculed by the father. St. Bernard from the Middle Ages spoke of each believer having a mystical experience with the personal God. This mysticism is rejected by some of the Protestant reformers. The Bernhard achieves a kind of melancholic, mystical union with the non-personal nature-deity. Fritz' friend, the young doctor Dietmahler, muses that he can save himself by going to Britain. Philosophically England offers him an esape from those who would deny reality (or the existence of the external individual entity in favor of the primacy of the inner self-conscious). In the British empiricism of Hume and Locke, knowledge comes from the interaction with the physical world, where the individual entity really exists. Experiential konwledge implies growth, and imparts meaning to becoming. Tangentially with this appeal to the Empiricist school I think the author may have been commenting on the indifference to cruelty which could coexist with the mentalists like Fichte and the German romantics, who would deny the reality of the individual entity. For Fritz the individual entity and hence the differences between entitiies is not real. Fritz searches for a unit that could be used to measure the physical as well as the spiritual. This unit where both dimensions subsist is the individual person, who by definition can only exist in relation to others. The Romantic sees eveerything melding into the non-personal, non-differentiated, soup of nature, hence Fritz' constant assertion, "all is one." With the reality of the person denied, the opposition to cruelty diminishes. Perhaps the history of philosophy brings us to the choice of personal or non-personal ideal, even personal or non-personal God.
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Summary: Not an easy read.
Review: I had so much trouble getting into this book it was painful. It is written about a time most of us are not familiar with and in a way that it is not embracing. Not a good choice for the beach or the train.
Rating:
Summary: Unpickupable.
Review: Tedious, turgid and no character development. Recycle immediately
Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read if you are a literary junkie
Review: Savour the ingenuity of this piece of work, by reading it from the perspective of Romanticism. As Novalis himself puts it "by investing the commonplace with a lofty significance, the ordinary with a mysterious aspect, the familiar with the prestige of the unfamiliar and the finite with the semblance of infinity, thereby I romanticise it" - you will see the relevance of simplicity of style in writing, yet not compromising on the complexities of the state of mind and affairs of the heart, along with the elegance that Fitzgerald bestows on her characters to create a true masterpiece.
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