Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Kinflicks (1976) is a novel by American writer Lisa Alther. It was Alther`s first published work, and the `subject of considerable pre-publication hyperbole.`[1]

Lisa Alther`s wonderful first novel -- her large, hilarious, serious, and powerfully affecting story of a young American woman`s uproarious tumble through the fads and shocks and `essential` experiences of the 60`s and 70`s -- has created a ground swell of advance excitement and admiration, exemplified by the letter from Doris Lessing on the back of the jacket. Ginny Babcock at twenty-seven, Cast-Out Adulterous Wife and Unfit Mother, is en route to Hullsport, Tennessee, and her own mother`s hospital bed (her father is dead, her family home on the auction block). She`s groggy with two in-flight martinis, huddled next to the DC-7`s emergency exit (`My family has always been into death`)... Her `home movies` -- her uncensored Kinflicks -- unreel: her first Never-Tell padded bra; the first time she made love -- to the hood-about-town, in her parents` bomb shelter (`I feared sperm almost as much as I feared Communists`); the Hullsport High Romance of the Decade: Flag Swinger Ginny and her Little All-American running back, Joe Bob Sparks (he had `a smile in excess of any possible stimulus`); `Do-It` Pruitt, Ginny`s grammar school chum who`d gone `all the way` for all the guys; Ginny hefting a lacquered bouffant like a plastic space helmet; Ginny in the truck of a car, with Joe Bob `twisting one of my nipples as though tuning a radio`; Ginny at her Ivy League college (`a close-fitting coif, wool suits, cameo brooches, low-heeled shoes`), starstruck by Spinoza and his scholarly herald, Miss Head... Ginny abandoning college and The Family and The City, resisting the American Capitalist Imperialist Economy, wearing fatigues and eating `whole grain bread you needed diamond-tipped teeth to chew,` joining a commune (with other `Communists, lesbians, draft-dodgers, atheists, and food stamp recipients`); Ginny, housewife (the handsome husband, the darling baby), in the Tupperware party set; Ginny into Transcendental Sex with her war (resister) hero; Ginny as the Madame Bovary of Stark`s Bog, Vermont... Now: Ginny at the hospital, at her mother`s side (`I have been well and happy, Mother. In between being sick and miserable.`) Ginny helplessly watching her mother besieged by doctors, by nurses, by dying (`Why was she being treated like an idiot child: Whose body was it?`) Ginny nerved for the maternal lecture (`Extramarital sex is vulgar. You must do your duty`), spending whole afternoons with her mother, the two of them absorbed in, protected by, soap operas (`unsurpassed as social realism...almost as tedious as life itself`); Ginny beginning (at last) to perceive her mother`s life as distinct from her own; Ginny coalescing, moving on... Absolutely alive and generous, filled with unconstrained laughter and feeling, KINFLICKS will stand as a novel of major importance about mothers and daughters, about friends and lovers, and about becoming a person in our time.

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote of Kinflicks that Alther was `a strong, salty, original talent.`[2]

Time called it an `abundantly entertaining progress through the unsettled 60s` and noted that `as exuberant caricature Kinflicks is authentically inspired`; while the novel `teems with cartoon eccentrics mouthing balloonfuls of inflated nonsense[, u]nhappily, Ginny [the protagonist] is equally one dimensional.`[1]

More than 30 years after its publication, Katherine Dieckmann, reviewing the author`s 2007 memoir, also commented on Kinflicks, calling it a `raucous novel [that] was all the rage among my high school set for its lurid paperback cover (nude female back, gilt lettering) and its frank talk of erections and lesbian hook-ups. Revisiting the novel 30 years later, it’s clear the packaging sold the contents short: Alther’s best-known book is a witty coming-of-age tale in which a tart-tongued protagonist named Ginny wanders her way through an identity crisis, mostly against a classic counterculture background.`[3]

LGBT, FEMINIZAM, lezbejke