Many these scenes are also left incomplete and open-ended. Its 55 short chapters reflect bright clear images from Novalis’ life, but as if we’re seeing them in the fragments of a smashed mirror. The structure of the book also adds to the sense of the unobtainable. And so it is that Fitzgerald’s characters, like her readers, are left flailing. The blue flower “can never be found, it can only be sought”, says Hermione Lee. In his unfinished novel Heinrich von Oftterdingen, the flower is something unattainable and unreachable. Fitzgerald took the idea of the blue flower direct from Novalis. The title already gives a sense of this intangibility.

Its prose is every bit as elusive as its subject. When writing about the real-life Novalis, for instance, Jeremy Adler said: “Mystical, fragmentary, allusive, paradoxical, abstruse, Novalis represents the first wave of German Romanticism at its most intractable.” This quote (taken from the Times Literary Supplement, by way of Hermione Lee’s biography of Fitzgerald) might as well be a description of The Blue Flower. Did I know what the blue flower was? What this novel was telling me?īut here again, I can console myself with the thought that not-quite-knowing is inherent in the novel. Yet when I closed it, I found myself clawing at empty air. As I was reading, I had a tantalising sense of meaning and certainty, just a few steps ahead of me, a page further on, not quite in my grasp. The other problem is that now I’ve reached the end of the book, I feel as if I’ve never been further away from understanding it. In her excellent introduction to the recent 4th Estate edition of the novel, Candia McWilliam describes finding herself – along with many others – burdening this book “with words as inexact and lumpy as ‘masterpiece’ and ‘genius’”.

Here, I take comfort from knowing that I’m not alone. Part of the challenge is to convey The Blue Flower’s excellence without glooping into adjectival slurry. One that is hard to explain – and especially tricky to write about. I can understand the concern: it’s an unusual book. Others also expressed disquiet that we should plunge straight into Fitzgerald’s strange story of the early life of the German romantic poet Novalis and his love for the young and sickly Sophie von Kuhn.

The blue flower book