Table Of Content
Roche has a five-year-old daughter, and so I ask if she hopes she will grow up to share Helen's relationship with her own body. Her father, like Helen's, was an engineer - he built factories for Mars in Germany - and her parents divorced when she was five. "Like all children of divorce," her poignant prologue reads, "I want to see my parents back together." She made them both promise not to read the book, and has since wondered whether subconsciously it was the protagonist's preoccupation with divorce she wanted to protect them from. Let’s face it; who of us hasn’t checked the tissue after a sneeze, peered into the toilet bowl, picked at a scab to see what was underneath?
All of this is supposed to be brave and disturbing, but “Wetlands” is simply and willfully aggressive. Helen’s a mess, and not a very interesting one. I started to suspect that I was writing a very arrogant book – something very ‘top-down’ rather than ‘bottom-up’. ‘Charlotte Roche tells Germany’s women how to appreciate their sexual organs’. I know that I have my own limits, my own taboos too, when it comes to talking about sex, and I realized that I could only really go full throttle if I voiced these ideas through a fictional character. This nut sees no connection between her delight in bacteria (she likes to rub her vulva all over public toilet seats, mopping up the stray pubic hairs and excretions of strangers) and the anal blister and concomitant infection that now require surgery of the bleakest kind.
To bodily go ...
We meet in her home city of Cologne, and although she speaks with only the faintest trace of a foreign accent, vocabulary often escapes her. "English people always think I'm a disabled person," she laughs, "because I sound English, but then I don't know really simple words." In person she is dainty, almost exaggeratedly ladylike, and much more playfully ambivalent than the public debate about her book. "Some people don't actually get the humour," she marvels, smiling, "but, for me, writing it was laugh out loud." Helen is meant to be a complicated character, but she is merely inconsistent. She is fascinated by anal sex, her wound and its discharge, yet mortified if she passes gas in a public toilet.
What to Read
She must have been delighted when Schwarzer responded to the book with an open letter ticking her off for advocating a patriarchal view of sex ("you don't have the solution, but the problem"). For me, she is advocating mutual generosity – which need not mean booking yourself into the nearest brothel. The protagonist, Elizabeth Kiehl, is in bed with her husband. "I don't grab his cock at first. I reach down farther – to his balls. I cradle them in my hand like a pouch full of gold." Blimey. His magazine has drooped; he is picking his nose and staring into space. "It's all about making him happy … I want to drive him absolutely wild. First, let's tease him a little …" Reading this book is like visiting another planet, but I think I should go there more often.
When the book was originally rejected by a German publisher on the grounds of being pornographic, Roche insisted to them that it was no such thing. But she admits the defensiveness was somewhat disingenuous. The only difficult part was inventing new names for the components of female genitalia - such as "pearl trunk" for the clitoris, and "lady fingers" for labia. Women and their rear ends are not a new subject. Former ballet dancer Toni Bentley wrote “The Surrender” in 2004, her memoir about sodomy that was appalling in a different and, frankly, less interesting way.
Early life
Providers are not able to remove or modify reviews on their own. Reviews can only be removed after an internal review by our customer service team. Generally, Wetlands touches upon a number of taboo topics not only in the sexual arena but also those that can be found in the society at large, particularly in dysfunctional families.
Books
Feuchtgebiete, which translates roughly as ‘wetlands’ or ‘moist patches’, was published by Cologne’s Dumont Verlag earlier this year. It is narrated by eighteen-year-old Helen Memel, an outspoken teenager whose childlike stubbornness is paired with a premature sense of sexual confidence. After a failed attempt to shave her intimate parts, Helen ends up in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Maria Hilf Hospital. She doesn’t leave the ward for the rest of the novel.
Her debut novel, Wetlands, which was published in her native Germany in 2008 and went on to become a worldwide bestseller, began with an 11-page description of the protagonist accidentally slicing into her haemorrhoids while shaving. Wrecked starts with a similarly detailed account of oral sex, which could well be described as "blow-by-blow". But I suspect such depths did not occur to Roche, who insists that “Wetlands” is a celebration of the female body. She does seem to have hitched a ride on the zeitgeist — the book is being translated into 27 languages.
Why Charlotte Roche's new book isn't for modern women - DW (English)
Why Charlotte Roche's new book isn't for modern women.
Posted: Tue, 06 Oct 2015 07:00:00 GMT [source]
About the author (
Wetlands, Roche says, had originally been intended as a serious polemic against the tyranny of female sexual hygiene. Unsurprisingly, Helen’s obsessions turn out to be a reaction to her parents’ divorce, and to her parents themselves. Her mother is so averse to bodily function that she claims not to have bowel movements, while her father is unashamed to give her a get-well “hemorrhoid pillow.” Neither talks about her mother’s attempt to kill herself and Helen’s brother when Helen was a child.
She is young, attractive, and, obvious from her many fan-produced YouTube videos, very popular. The title, which might be translated as "wetlands" or "damp areas," here refers to a woman's genitals. Roche's glee in goading the feminist establishment is palpable.
If you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you. Charlotte Roche's heroine, Helen, is a wistful feminist creation, a walking, talking, bleeding, masturbating, haemorrhoid-bedecked apologist for anal sex and home-made tampons. She's not without a touch of Munchausen's, too, trying to use a self-induced hospital emergency to reunite her long-estranged parents. Open it at random and read a page and you cannot help but blush. At worst you think she intends to shock and disgust; at best to get people, particularly women, to talk about taboo subjects. But if you can get past the rushing torrent of vaginal secretions, pus, fecal matter and menstrual blood, there is an affecting story of a sad and incredibly lonely girl.
When I was eighteen, just before my final exams, I quit school altogether and got a job at the music channel Viva. I’m still proud of the work I did in TV – it was an immense achievement for a young person. Viva launched the careers of some of the people now regarded as Germany’s most exciting actors, like Heike Makatsch and Christian Ulmen.
Most patients would subside into misery and humiliation afterwards, desperately awaiting release - either from "the ass ward" or from life itself. But Helen, despite a fear of never having a working sphincter again, embarks on an amorous pursuit of one of the nurses, and a campaign to spread her blood, germs and pee throughout the hospital. In drips and oozes, her real story emerges. She is the completely neglected child of two repressed and depressed people. She doesn’t know what her father does for work. She has memories she does not trust and a recurring vision of an event that could not have occurred.
It's not always clear, however, whether Helen is sexually liberated, or slightly mad. When not trying to seduce the nurse, she is preoccupied by a childish fantasy that if she can only get her long divorced parents' hospital visits to coincide, they will get back together again. Panicking that she may be discharged before engineering their reunion, she forcibly ruptures her wound to prolong her stay - a feat of self-harm almost unreadable for its violence, and ultimate futility. A feminist critique might question why Roche has created a character who seems to conform to the old notion that sexual liberation always comes at the price of instability. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel.
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