The ubiquitous Gone Girl never seems to go away.  Gillian Flynn and Cheryl Strayed (author of Wild) are paired in an article about books made into movies in this Sunday’s New York Times.  I have yet to read Wild, and may wait for Reese Witherspoon’s version, but I share Bob Odenkirk’s view from his New York Times interview in “By the Book” –

I thought “Gone Girl” pushed the unreliable-narrator gambit past the breaking point. Please don’t hit me with your copy of “Gone Girl.”

Nevertheless, I read the article and admired the two self-posessed American forty-somethings.

Still searching for inspiration, I found Stacy Schiff’s review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography – a new book by Hermione Lee.  Schiff, the biographer of Cleopatra (see my review here ), notes the rediscovery of an older woman who had marinated through most of her life, before producing her first novel at age 60 and winning the Man Booker Prize in 1979 when she was 63 (proving it’s never too late).   The Blue Flower, published when Fitzgerald was 78, is called her masterpiece.

Hermione Lee, Fitzgerald’s biographer, describes The Blue Flower as a “novel about youth, hope, idealism, and the imagination…

The Blue Flower imagines the families, history and ideas of late 18th-century provincial Germany, the period in which the philosopher Novalis (Fritz von Hardenberg) was a young man, just when Romanticism was emerging…a mysterious short book… Fritz’s family life, his work as a tax collector for the salt mines, his philosophical education, the story of the woman who silently loves him, his romantic passion for the naive Sophie, who dies a cruel death, and the landscape of his everyday life…his visionary dream of a blue flower that can never be found haunts the book like a half-remembered tune…

Music is very important to the novel, and it is constructed, boldly, in short scenes, like moments in a dream or songs. The blue flower keeps shifting its meaning. What is its name, Sophie asks him. “He knew it once,” Fritz replies. “He was told the name, but he has forgotten it. He would give his life to remember it”.

Fitzgerald said once that the blue flower is what you want of life. “Even if there’s no possibility of reaching it, you must never give up”.

I am on my way to pick up a copy from the library.  It sounds familiar but I don’t remember reading it.

Have you read it?