Captain's Log: The Blue Flower

The past is a foreign country; love, too

A couple weeks ago I wrote about books that are tough to speak about in regular company, and I suppose I’m on a something of a roll. This one was recommended to me by a bookstore customer – sometimes you’re having that good a talk about books, that the customer decides to throw one back at you – who was brave enough to say, well, you’ve got to read The Blue Flower. I say brave because Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1995 Booker Prize winning novel is, to put it bluntly, about a man who is struck by love at first sight with a somewhat disabled twelve year old girl. And that customer didn’t sugarcoat it! Just said, it is what it is – but you’d probably like it. The book’s set in the eighteenth century, though! Things were different! Don’t run off all of a sudden! If the Booker judges could get around it then surely you can too. The Blue Flower is a strange little gem of a book, a piece of ‘historical fiction’ (I feel like washing my mouth out after using that term, given the glut of pablum that comes out within that genre) that is attendant to the pure strangeness (to us now) of the way people used to live, with characters unaware of the moment they’re living through and grounded in particularities as opposed to the sweeping generalization of ‘history.’ It is also one of the great texts of the irrationality of love, its sheer overwhelming wrecking force, and it pairs that inquiry into love with metaphysic philosophical explorations. I don’t know if I’ve ever really read anything like it; it is the most exquisitely executed version of itself, a completely singular vision into the hazy ends of our knowledge.