Novalis, Penelope Fitzgerald style

Philip Oltermann of The Independent on The Blue Flower as a reference for Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl, by Gert Hofmann:

It’s hard to read Hofmann’s last novel without thinking of at least two others with prepubescent objects of desire at their centre: the German poet Novalis’s 12-year-old wife Sophie, as imagined by Penelope Fitzgerald in The Blue Flower; and, inevitably, Nabokov’s Dolores Haze in Lolita.

The Blue Flower–again

Since we’re still on the subject of this beautiful, sharp book, we thought we’d share a review that comes to us all the way from the Ukraine via the blog Whimwit.

We love it that this blogger can get with the idea that it’s absolutely NOT necessary to understand every single element a book’s narrative–something we think is part and parcel of what it means to experience Penelope’s art.

This is the first book in a long while to leave me speechless. I don’t know anything about it, except that I liked it. Fitzgerald has charmed me out of my need to dissect every piece of writing into intelligible little pieces. It seems only fitting–Romanticists like Novalis were in some measure reacting against rationality.

Ostensibly, the story is about love. But part of Novalis’s legacy to the world is Liebesreligion, “the religion of love,” and it’s unsurprising then that here talking about love entails discussing everything. Underneath the dainty peak of Fitzgerald’s beautiful, breezy prose sits an iceberg of wit, philosophy, and impeccable grasp of history. In the end, The Blue Flower is the most awesomely strange novel I’ve read all year, and the originality doesn’t even seem to be the primary intent.

The Best Book NOT to win the Booker–The Blue Flower

People out in the book blogosphere are still talking about The Guardian’s “Tears, Tiffs and Triumphs” article about 40 years of Booker Prizes, and we’ve got quite a few things to say as well–as you’ll see after the jump.