Alasdair GrayAnmeldelser

Odd, occasionally glacial, but in the end incredible epistolary novel. Truly curious to see how it's going to work as a film, totally worth a read if ya like anarcho-humanistic weirdo historical fiction like Pynchon. Took me a bit to get through some of the bits but the narrative is super easy to follow and enjoyable as hell, loved the dedication to maintaining ambiguity through it all.

Big nope. Thought the film adaptation looked smug and pretentious but defaulting to the novel didn't inspire me either, sadly. This is basically an old man's ranty rant about history and society disguised as a commentary on the treatment of women: 'You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.' Gray also crams every nineteenth century literary device known to man into first half of the book, before flipping the narrative to sneer at those Victorian tropes - and repeating the same old rants from a supposedly feminist perspective. Yawn. I'm glad Emma Stone and the costume designer got something out of the film, but I definitely won't be wasting any more time on Alisdair Gray's griping.

Abbandonato.

2024 movie #59. 2023. Very strange retelling of the Frankenstein's monster story with Emma Stone as the monster. Good movie but weird. Stone deserved her Oscar for her work here as it looked like a very hard role to play and see did it very well. #PoorThingsFilm

Somewhat weird - not my sort of story!

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (336pp 1992)

Would I read more books by this author?
Most definitely.

Would I recommend this book?
Definitely.

To whom would I recommend this book?
It would have to be people who can stand a little weirdness and who can cut their way through the superficial carnal aspects of the book to see its real purpose and meaning.

Did this book inspire me to do anything?
Yes! I am planning a day in Glasgow to visit the main sites in the story. It will make an interesting excursion and give me a photo-journal opportunity.

I acquired this book in 2011 but have only gotten around to reading it now. I bought it while I was reading and loving “Lanark”. “Poor Things” has not disappointed. My reading it now was prompted by a friend who watched the Oscar winning film. This spurred me on to read the book before I watch the film.

Having loved Lanark I was expecting some weirdness. It was not as weird as I expected, but read like an historical fiction with one piece of Science Fiction at its heart. There is so much in the book I cannot see how a screen adaptation could possibly present all the content. My suspicion is that the film deals mostly with the sexual aspects of the story rather than with the primary focus of the book which is the presentation of political viewpoints and the promotion of political philosophies focused on improving the lot of the people rather than increasing the wealth of the wealthy. Comments by friends who have seen the film and reviews of the movie appear to support my suspicions. I intend to watch the film, but in my usual approach to screen adaptations I will not be complaining about how the film does not reflect the book, but rather enjoying the movie as something different from the book, but will be interested to see what was cut out of the story and what has been added in. Given the complexity of the main character I am not surprised it was an opportunity for Emma Stone to win an Oscar. I am looking forward to seeing her performance.

There are several themes to the story with a rather steamy thread running through the earlier parts of the book which, while the film may emphasise this, is primarily a means of hooking the reader to read on and then used as a vehicle to facilitate discussion on various political movements, their core tenets, and to present their impact on the population at large. Also presented are critiques of social norms that were, and still are, abhorrent to the sensitivities of the more liberal minded. It is a strongly feminist book so people should push through the misogyny presented in the early chapters to get through to the powerful messages that follow.

If I was to sum the story up in one sentence it would be:
“This is the life story of girl who experienced life in an accelerated fashion and grew into a determined woman who worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the poor through the advancement of medical practice and women’s rights.”

If I were to ignore the true messages of the book and simply describe it based on the superficial elements I could describe it as:
“The wife of Frankenstein was a nymphomaniac.”

It's almost criminal that Yorgos Lanthimos read this book about child-rearing, feminism, socialism, classism, and patriarchy and made a movie only about sexuality. I loved the movie but now am so angry that he removed the full human condition from it. Bella - Victoria was an intellectual, a philosopher, a feminist, a scientist, and a political practitioner, and Lanthimos made her into only a sexual being. What a missed opportunity. I would love to see a movie based on the whole book.

I read this after seeing the movie and wondering if the book it was based on could be anywhere near as bizarre. I know comparisons aren't fair because books and movies are very different kinds of media but I do it anyway. The biggest difference I found was that the movie left out Bella’s own version of the story which was nowhere near as interesting as McCandless'. So, while that part did add the element of an unreliable narrator, not including it was a smart move because I thought the movie's ending wrapped things up perfectly. Another difference was that the book had less sexuality and more commentary about sexual, social, and political double standards. Since a fair amount of the social and political commentary was satire of British and Scottish conventions, most of it was lost on me. Maybe if I knew something about the regional history and culture I would have liked this more than I did. As it is, I liked the movie better.½

My ILL request for "Poor Things" came without the dust jacket, so I got to enjoy this beautiful Scottish Thistle graphic embossing with an aphorism that Alasdair Gray credits to a poem by Denis Leigh. The book has frame story with four distinct parts, Lanthimos adapts the fun part. However, he does Victoria/Bella dirty because the most feminist part of the novel, the frame in which she tells her OWN story, is completely cut. She clarifies, disputes, corrects, truth-tells, shapes her own biography and political position in a far less fantastical and far more believable way, as happens to women who can't afford to live in fantasy land. Not so much fun as 150-odd pages of horny "wedding" and sex work, but there you go.

"My imagination had awakened. The imagination is, like the appendix, inherited from a primitive epoch when it aided the survival of our species, but in modern scientific industrial nations it is mainly a source of disease. I had prided myself on lacking one, but it had only lain dormant."

Due to ereader/ebook weirdness I didn't read the introduction until I'd finished the book so I was surprised by the ending letter. I actually think that's a decent way to read the book - it makes bits of the first 90% more irritating, but the impact when you reach the end is a lot stronger when you don't know it's coming. So I guess I'm not about to say anything that's a spoiler if you read the introduction (which is by the author and part of the story, to be clear) but if you want to try it a different way look away now, heh.

The book works by showing the life of a woman through multiple perspectives, with none giving a full and clear picture, and only at the end does she get to speak for herself as herself - and still, although she corrects some things, she glosses over most of the narrative and admits there are facts in there even if it's a fanciful story. Because the vast majority is told by and through McCandless, even the perspectives of the other characters are untrustworthy as we only see them through his eyes. There's a long letter from Bella in the middle, but again it's not entirely clear how much is edited by McCandless - and how much of Victoria disagreeing at the end is a retrospective embarrassment and editing of her past? And it's clear Bella/Victoria is not being entirely honest about a few things even at the end (the true story of what happened with Duncan Wedderburn can only be guessed at). And on top of that we have the judgmental introduction of Alisdair Gray (as character) where he insists McCandless's narrative is basically accurate, even if it has dramatic flair, and constantly reinserts himself through footnotes to justify it through historical fact (and fictional historical fact). The epistolary style and the shifts in reporting combine to give a lot of depth if you think about it and try and piece together a "real" story (you can't obviously, but it's interesting where your own ideas lead you)

My impression was of a story about multiple men - except Godwin - struggling to deal with one woman trying to make her own story and imposing their own stories on her that said more about them than her actions. Someone like McCandless was not as awful as the rest but could still only see her independence and beliefs as something borne from an essentially supernatural event - Frankenstein and Pygmalion combined - rather than something a normal woman in society could develop. He couldn't accept Godwin's goodness because it would make him feel too judged so he created a story about his "friend" to make him seem the pitiable one.

Big and baffling. Feels like it needs a re-read to comprehend, but it is big. There are Big Themes of socialism and capitalism and Freud and subconscious, but it's hard to know how seriously any of it is being taken. The parts (Books) that are fantastical are sort of compelling and sort of tiresome—lots of visual imagery and description that I find hard to keep in mind. The time-mangling stuff is well done, though. Plot is picaresque in these parts. The parts (Books) that are realist-ish are kind of straightforward and very much a reminder that the 1950s are now an awful long time ago. The protagonist is both fully realised and a cypher. The sexual politics and general attitude to women are both pretty dated. The whole is somehow less playful than I expected from Gray, though there is the odd good joke. It's certainly an achievement but I don't know what it achieves.

Fantastic and brilliantly written

A Frankenstein-inspired story of Bella Baxter, Archibald McCandless and Godwin Baxter that, in its complexity, is a thrill to read. The feminist, scientist, medicinal, science fictional readings of this book seem to give different conclusions that all tie in together in the theme of the body, and what it means to truly be human, sexually, biologically, mentally and physically. Wonderfully written and put together.

Yup, it's Alasdair Gray alright.

Best read over a prolonged period, or the stories might seem to be a bit redundant.

As a short story collection it's decent, as an insight into the author's work/method it's excellent, and as a demonstration of the progress of a writer from unknown to established to master-class it succeeds admirably.

But, ultimately, either you like Gray's writing or you don't.

Wow! Joyce meets Vonnegut in Glasgow. Wohda thought? Wow!

Kudos to Gray for taking an unlikely premise and sustaining it over the first half of the novel. I did however get a bit bogged down coming up to the mid-point where the fantasies were a bit repetitive, as befits the compulsive nature of them I suppose. The complicated asides on politics stretched me a bit. The childhood memories bubbling up did give a fuller, more human picture of Jock's personality and the sections in early adulthood showed how trapped and disappointed he was though without entirely explaining his present state in any facile way. I was able to follow most of the experimental aspects and they kept it interesting. Although he's a conservative, it's a subtle portrait and you come to understand his worldview. Overall, I admired it without it necessarily being a classic.

This book was a bit patchy and long for me. There were sections I really enjoyed and yet as a whole I wasn't quite convinced by it. It's weird and inventive with some very memorable scenes, but its what I would characterise as 'men's fiction' where the women tend to be a bit poorly drawn and unconvincing. I probably most enjoyed some of the deconstruction towards the end. Its quite disjointed between the realism of books 1 and 2, and the fantasy of books 3 and 4, which by the way are not in that order in the book. I feel like its very much a curate's egg, but it's a cult classic and I'm glad I've read it.

Fascinating, confusing, weird. I can't even begin to offer a plot synopsis. I was fascinated by parts and bored to tears by other parts. Epic strangeness that nevertheless strikes amazingly close to home at times. A novel not soon forgotten.

An odd and entertaining novel—part Frankenstein, part Pygmalion, part Portrait of a Lady. The epilogue puts an interesting spin on things, making me wonder how the novel would have read had it been at the beginning.

Most of the commentary on this book concentrates on its famous division between the Bildungsroman/roman à clef sections of Books 1 and 2, and the adult/fantastical sections of Books 3 and 4. That's true, and there's a lot to say about the way that Gray structured the book to enhance the parallelisms between Thaw and Lanark's lives (and he even says as much in the Epilogue), but I think the main division in the book is between the quotidian stuff - meaning the lives and loves of the dual protagonists - and the broader thematic stuff about society and its evolution.

The Introduction, which like all introductions should really be read last, claims that this is the Glaswegian equivalent of Ulysses. This is neither a true compliment, as Glasgow does not come off like a very nice place in the book, nor really all that meaningful, since Lanark and Ulysses are fairly different works. Lanark has some metafictional elements in it that I didn't enjoy much, but at heart it's divided between a sort of young adult novel about the adolescence of the artistic, asthmatic, alienated youth Duncan Thaw, who's openly based on the author; and a dystopian political novel about Lanark, who is Thaw's spiritual doppelgänger. Both halves of the book, somewhat reordered for artistic effect, have a lot of obvious parallels with each other, and while different readers will have their own favorite parts, I thought the "lovable loser" sections of Thaw's story were the strongest, both since they seemed to be written with real feelings, and because few people who grow through adolescence won't sympathize with his growing pains. By contrast, a lot of the Lanark sections consist of him essentially blundering around in a bizarre future landscape that's clearly based on Glasgow, yet alien enough to be offputting without truly being something new.

The real interest for me was in seeing how Thaw/Lanark's emotional turmoil got reflected in the world around them. One of the more interesting "soft" sci-fi novels I've read in the past few years is Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, wherein the main character sees the similarity of life at many different scales - conflict between individuals is like conflict between tribes, is like conflict between races, is like conflict between species, and so on. In Lanark, the author, in a cringingly awkward ex cathedra cameo that's reminiscent of nothing so much as the Architect scene in the second Matrix movie, says as much to Lanark: "The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason." That's the kind of stuff I like reading about, what the relationship is between the omnipresence of human frailty and the corresponding flaws in our societies, what our growth and change says about us, and whether our actions are really leading us anywhere or merely sublimating our failures into ever less satisfying receptacles. The novel doesn't talk about that stuff as much as I'd have liked, but it's good to know Gray was thinking about it when he wrote it.

The emotional turmoil stuff is good too, although better in the Thaw parts, where he's just a kid and can be excused for his weirdness and clumsiness, than in Lanark's, who spends a lot of time in baffling non-conversations with the people around him. Gray is very good at making emotional pain present, be it towards parents, friends, or lovers. Some parts of Thaw's story are actually hard to read, so vividly do Thaw's struggles with girls, his art, his parents, and his maturity come across. However, Lanark strikes me as a book that would have been improved without the metafictional Epilogue where Gray explains exactly that. I'm just not sure it's possible to be truly artistically successful when being so self-referential, even if the little list of plagiarisms is actually really helpful for thinking about what the novel means. I prefer works to stand on their own; it's the job of critics - who are actually encouraged to talk about books and their reactions to them, and reactions to other reactions, etc. - who should be trusted with that stuff, because otherwise the author's breaking of the fourth wall just emphasizes how artificial their work is, and all suspension of disbelief is lost.

Other than that, it's an immense, fascinating novel about a man's journey through the world and his relationship to it that will please both lovers of sci-fi and young adult literature, who are seldom in agreement.

't lag niet aan't penneke, maar aan't menneke.

Lanark is een boek dat je helemaal mee zuigt, waar je steeds dieper inkruipt en dat je langzaam inkapselt in zijn eigen waarheden, kleuren, krochten en geplogenheden.
Toen ik om werktechnische redenen het boek aan de kant moest leggen, vervaagde die wereld dag in dag uit steeds meer. Toen ik het enkele weken later eindelijk weer ter hand nam, was de afstand tussen mij en het boek te groot geworden. Misschien had het met wat geduld nog wel gelukt, maar ik geraakte niet zomaar meer binnen in die unieke wereld die Gray geschapen heeft. Alleen opnieuw beginnen leek me een optie, maar daar had ik dan weer niet het karakter voor. Jammer, maar zo gaat het soms met een boek.
4 sterren voor de leeservaring, de unieke pen en de indrukwekkende sfeer die Lanark opbouwt. 4 sterren tot op het moment waar we afscheid namen.

Strangely unbalanced throughout. At times I was so bored I considered putting the book aside for good without having finished it, sometimes I was so enthralled I could hardly stop reading even if I no longer had the time to continue.

Alasdair Gray notes in the Epilogue section, strangely on p. 493 of his 560 page novel: " A possible explanation is that the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones. This note, well the entire section, appears to reconcile the disparate narratives which occupy the novel. Seldom have I ever encountered such polarizing sections; the Thaw scenes I absolutely loved and the Lanark/Unthank episodes were perfectly dreadful. The latter was likely intentional, portraits of hell should be infernal, I suppose.

Digressions and comparisons ensue. The artist's failure to love is mirrored with Hell's thwarting of contentment. I see that. It does beg some reflection.

It was good novel for one's birthday week, especially while entertaining dear visitors from overseas. It was a whirlwind of trips and laughs. A beer or two may have been swallowed along the way. Lanark was good for all that. Folks were taken back to the airport. The heat actually left the area and this allowed the delegate theme at the end to be absorbed without enkindling any serial rage.

Lanarks works and it is good to love and endure.

A stirring melange of Frankenstein and Pygmalion. I bought my copy of this at a great shop in Camden; I then read half in Heathrow and finished such flying over the Atlantic.