SOURCE: “Death and the Maiden,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4824, September 15, 1995, p. 20.

In the following review, Annan discusses the amount of detail Fitzgerald manages to put into The Blue Flower.

The German Romantics were drunk with ideas, and Novalis was the drunkest. He is the hero or anti-hero of this biographical novel. He died in 1801, aged twenty-eight, leaving a few beautiful religious poems which many Germans know by heart because they read like hymns and are sung in church. His mystical poems can be as bizarre and embarrassing as anything written in the seventeenth century; one of them imagines a kind of Eucharist in which the sea turns into heavenly blood and the rocks into delicate palpitating flesh and the universe embraces and eats itself up in a voracious orgy of love. Those who partake of the feast, the poem concludes, appreciate the food. Novalis’s love lyrics...