The Blue Flower
Page 19
‘So how does she do it? Is it the style? To an extent, yes, but not in any obvious way. The prose is rapid, plain and unassuming, with a fondness for dry wit and familiar allocutions. There is little imagery and no recondite vocabulary. Obliquity, timing, and the virtues of omission and allusion are her secrets. Paragraphing bears no obvious relation to temporal or spatial co-ordinates. We flit from one point of time, one view and place, with the nonchalance of a ministering yet invisible spirit.
‘These are, in a sense, negative virtues, and this may be the key to the mystery. How many historical novelists seem to view the past like someone scanning a brochure of Tuscan villas in a grey November, as a foreign country where they do things not just differently but more interestingly? And when real historical figures with a known fate and stature are involved, how hard not to fall into the fallacy of assuming that they and their contemporaries were either aware of or wholly unconcerned about the figures they would cut for us, backlit by the retrospective glow which posterity has bestowed on them. Penelope Fitzgerald does not just step safely through this minefield, she makes of it a dance arena in which not only the central characters but all their numerous siblings, relatives and friends come to tumultuous and convincing life. Her past is as present, this being as “unbearably light”, its search for meaning as urgent and provisional, as our own.’
Michael Dibdin, Independent on Sunday
‘There are twenty perfectly competent novelists at work in Britain today, but only a handful producing what one could plausibly call works of literature. Of this handful, Penelope Fitzgerald possesses what one can only call the purest imagination. Her limpid, exact prose reflects an unwaveringly ‘clear view of the human predicament. She seems to be one of those rare artists gifted with both the knowledge of how things are, and the skill to record what she knows with subtlety and devastating truthfulness.’
A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard
‘The tension between Fitzgerald’s cool and the alien turbulence of most of her characters adds piquancy … each one, however briefly he or she appears, is as visible and audible as the twigs scraping the windows. Fitzgerald tells you what they eat (goose, eel, cabbage, plums), what they read (if they read), and what they think about the French Revolution. It is fastidious, funny, sad, clever and very engaging.’
Gabriele Annan, TLS
‘She is an intelligent writer, superbly and unfailingly so. But her dry wit is also allied to a great talent for emotional sympathy. The disappointment of Karoline Just … is as terrible and as penetratingly understood as the humiliation of Chekhov’s Varya rummaging for galoshes while the cherry orchard changes hands. A wise and funny novel.’
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times
‘The life of Fritz von Hardenberg, the German romantic poet Novalis, might not seem a likely subject for Fitzgerald’s ironic gift. In fact, the cool examination of the poet’s grotesque family, all the minute historical details which are never laboured and always convincing, and the unsentimental, moving account of Fritz’s slightly absurd passions are all very beautifully done. Fitzgerald never seems to try too hard; she never bullies the reader, but her dry, small-scale prose manages to produce large-scale emotional effects.’
Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday
‘The high romantic foreshadows our more recent tragicomic times. But what seems to fascinate Fitzgerald is the parochialism that preceded all this: high-minded aspirations struggling with a daily life of petty formalities and rigid observance … Penelope Fitzgerald writes about all of this with affection and amused detachment. She has evidently immersed herself in the background, and the novel has an almost daunting authenticity. Lightly, delicately, she brings to life these lost manners and attitudes.’
Anthony Thwaite, Sunday Telegraph
‘Period and household are wonderfully well set up … and pretty soon we know how contemporaries could tell the Hardenbergs were skint, that members of the upper classes were not supposed to run in public (send a servant) and that in eighteenth-century Saxony you could take a glass of schnapps at the grocer’s but not at an inn. The magical onset of snow, the ceremonies of Christmas Eve, the mundane beauty of dawn after a morning duel: the novel is full of such sensuous occasions, precisely felt and seen. The result is a meticulous, clever and often witty fiction of German cultural history.’
Michael Ratcliffe, Observer
Other Works
Also by Penelope Fitzgerald
EDWARD BURNE-JONES
THE KNOX BROTHERS
THE GOLDEN CHILD
THE BOOKSHOP
OFFSHORE
HUMAN VOICES
AT FREDDIE’S
CHARLOTTE MEW AND HER FRIENDS
INNOCENCE
THE BEGINNING OF SPRING
THE GATE OF ANGELS
THE MEANS OF ESCAPE
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Fourth Estate
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Published by Flamingo 2002
Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1996
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1995
Copyright (c) Penelope Fitzgerald 1995
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,
characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work
of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities,
is entirely coincidental.
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