Blue Flower: Blue Guitar: and The Life of An Unknown Man

     Two blues--'The Blue Flower,' by Penelope Fitzgerald and 'The Blue Guitar' by John Banville: and 'The Life of an Unknown Man,' by Andrei Makine. These three terrific novels have been my fiction reading over the last few weeks, and--with non-fiction--I did follow through with Hitler until the bitter end. One of the things I can never really get my mind around is Goebbels' wife poisoning her six children...
     The Andrei machine novel starts with a Russian writer of modest success, Ivan Shutov, who has lived in Paris for twenty years, whose much younger girl friend leaves him. He decides to reconnect with a one-time love in Russia. The old love in Russia, Lea, is now something of oligarch, seemingly very wealthy and running a chain of hotels. She lets him stay in her huge apartment, which is being constructed from a number of soviet-era communal apartments, and in one room there remains an ancient, bedridden man who is soon to be placed in a home. His name is Vronsky, and in the major portion of the book, he narrates his story to Shutov, starting as singing student in Leningrad during the siege; his war service as a gunner that takes him to Berlin; his return after the war, when he meets up with his girl-friend from his student days; and his incarceration in the Gulag. All of this is told in an absolutely masterful way--you are almost falling over the frozen bodies in Leningrad; you see the gun of a German tank trained on you; and you face the interrogators when you are arrested. All very, very, well done, and it is essentially a history of Soviet Russia from Stalin through to the corrupt world of the oligarchs.

     'The Blue Flower' imagines the families, history and ideas of late 18th-century provincial Germany, when the philosopher Novalis (Fritz von Hardenberg) was a young man and Romanticism was emerging. Not much is actually explained: but from the first page, when two young men are walking into the courtyard of a family house on their annual wash-day, we are entirely inside their world and their perceptions.

      'The Blue Flower' is a short book--a couple of hundred pages--But, as one critic said, it is completely realized. Fritz's family life, his work for the salt mines; his philosophical education: the woman who silently loves him; his romantic passion for the naive, thirteen-year-old Sophie, who dies a cruel death: and the landscape of his everyday life---these are are all brilliantly created. And then there is his visionary dream of a blue flower that can never be found.

     Doris Lessing said, "A Magical little book." A.S. Byatt said, 'The Blue Flower' is a masterpiece. (Surprising that feminists have not got round to a 'mistresspice.')

     And last--possibly least--there is 'The Blue Guitar,' by John Banville. 350 pages of extraordinary writing. An eccentric, garrulous, first person narrator. A clunky plot of infidelity with the wife of a friend. Extraordinary language--brilliant, brilliant sentences. But where it all led, heaven knows. Endless philosophizing about life, love, death, pain, regret, the inwardness and outwardness of painting, the psychology of theft (the narrator is a compulsive thief)...virtually all the major concerns of life come under the narrator's scrutiny. I finished it, but I was impatient at many points. Looking at reviews, I found the following:

     “It was great to discover that linguistic beauty could be pursued as an end in itself,” Banville said in his Paris Review interview. So we come to “The Blue Guitar” for this beauty, melody and rhythm. It’s just that this investigation of the surface of the world, of the creation of art, is shackled to a plot sabotaged by its own narrator.     In his novel “The Infinities,” a compelling narrative voice rose from a mathematician who had suffered a stroke — a pure, roaming brain. “The Blue Guitar” advances Banville’s lifelong project and pushes the world through his “mesh of language.” It reveals new, opulent sentences. But if his story is set upon a sabotaged narrative scaffolding, the chiming beauty of all these sentences competes with another sound, an underscore of persistent wooden thunk."