Кедей Нәрселер: Арчибальд МакКэндлесс дәрігердің ерте өмірінен эпизодтар

1992 novel by Alasdair Gray

Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M. D., Scottish Public Health Officer is a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize the same year. The novel was called "a magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book" by the London Review of Books. It is a departure from Gray's usual subject matter of Glasgow realism and fantasy. However, its Victorian narrative takes in Gray's previous concerns with social inequalities, relationships, memory and identity.

The main body of the work centres on Bella Baxter, a woman whose early life and identity are the subject of some ambiguity. That ambiguity is complicated by her husband Archibald McCandless's autobiography Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer which distorts the truth about his life with Bella. He claims that she was a corpse, resurrected by McCandless's colleague, scientist Dr Godwin Baxter, who had her brain replaced with that of her unborn fetus, resulting in her having an infant's mind. While designed to be Baxter's companion, her sexual appetite causes her to pursue other men, including McCandless and a foppish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn, with whom she elopes and embarks on a hedonistic odyssey around Europe, Northern Africa, and Central Asia. This narrative is followed by Bella's refutation of its facts, suggesting that her "poor fool" of a husband has concocted a life for her from the prevailing gothic and romantic motifs of the period: it "positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries". This is reinforced by the novel's intricate echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. These fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text, and relates the "discovery" of the papers by his real life friends, Michael Donnelly and Elspeth King. The introduction also hosts a critique of Glasgow City Council's treatment of its culture and heritage in the neglect of the city's social history museum, the People's Palace, and a brief mention of Glasgow's time as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, which was the subject of a more sustained satire in his novel Something Leather.

A film adaptation of the book was produced with Yorgos Lanthimos directing and Tony McNamara writing the script. The cast includes Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Kathryn Hunter, and Jerrod Carmichael. The adaptation was released in theatres on December 8, 2023.