Extract

If a philosopher is not a man, who is?

A young philosophy student in eighteenth-century Saxony falls in love with a girl of no particular brilliance and declares her his soul's destiny, and no one around him can explain why. Penelope Fitzgerald published this novel in 1995, at seventy-eight, and it tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, who became the poet Novalis and died at twenty-eight, leaving behind fragments that helped define German Romanticism. The prose is spare and wry, its short chapters moving with the precision of a chess game played in candlelight. Fitzgerald refuses to sentimentalize what she clearly loves. The blue flower of the title is the Romantic symbol of longing for the infinite, and this novel knows such longing is both luminous and absurd.