M HKA Ensembles

Book, 19.7 x 12.8 cm, 317 p., language : English, publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, London (First published 1992), ISBN : 978-0-7475-6228-3.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/34).

Literary synopsis

Poor Things is full of games, it pretends to be an autobiography found in a box of legal papers being destroyed by a Glasgow law firm. A young student doctor, Archibald McCandless, becomes infatuated with an older, wilder eccentric student called Godwin Baxter (or just 'God' to his friends). Baxter finds the body of a drowned woman, heavily pregnant and victim of suicide. He cannot save the woman, so he transplants the brain of the baby into the body of the adult and resucitates her. He then has to care for a woman with the mind of a child. When McCandless visits, he falls deeply in love with the woman, who is named Bella and who is wild, willful, sexually precocious and intellectually inquisitive to the point of pathology. All this is followed by a letter from Bella herself to her future granchildren, explaining to them not to believe their late father's ravings.

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