Table Of Content
Back in 1965, Norman Mailer in “An American Dream” devotes at least a chapter to the subject in a celebration and embrace of the scandalous. But young Helen, though she speaks with bravado and pretends nothing she does is a big deal, really wants to challenge us and force us to question our beliefs. The book begins as if Helen is making fun of us, putting us down for our prudish attention to hygiene.
British-German television presenter and author / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Wrecked by Charlotte Roche – review - The Guardian
Wrecked by Charlotte Roche – review.
Posted: Wed, 08 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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These include self-mutilation, amnesia triggered by recreational drug abuse, people's inability to deal with suicide attempts, and incest. For Kiehl, sex provides relief from a sadness that threatens to overwhelm her. Several years earlier, on the eve of her wedding to a previous partner, three of her brothers were killed and her mother injured in a car crash. The accident and its fallout are described in devastating detail – the account is, apparently, largely autobiographical. With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel's 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany.
Early life
‘If she really knew how beautiful she was, she would hardly have met up with him, so it was best not to tell her.’Fiction by Lukas Maisel, translated by Ruth Martin. ‘From a dish washer to an author who writes about washing dishes.’Memoir by Ilija Matusko, translated by Jen Calleja.
Locarno Film Festival Review: Is 'Wetlands' the Most Disgusting Coming of Age Movie Of All Time? - IndieWire
Locarno Film Festival Review: Is 'Wetlands' the Most Disgusting Coming of Age Movie Of All Time?.
Posted: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Helen entertains herself by remembering varied sex acts, obsessing over bodily fluids and playing pranks on the hospital workers. I’m afraid I don’t think England is any better than America in that respect. In terms of body-culture, England is always quick to follow the latest trends in the States. And it always amuses me how Americans and English people will to this day continue to make jokes about German women having hairy armpits. These days, German women shave themselves too, you know. And don’t worry, I don’t think just because they read my book they will suddenly stop doing so.
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.
What to Read
As with Chuck Palahniuk, there's a consistent - and somewhat formulaic - endeavour here to gross you out. Helen is keen to inform us, repeatedly, that every squeezable, drainable, detachable substance produced by the body (hers, her lovers', or yours) can be and should be eaten - except hair, which she shaves off weekly, and ear wax, for which she shows unexpected disdain. There's no mention of belly button fluff either - but blackheads, snot, puke, pus, scabs, tears, smegma, eyelid crumbs, vaginal discharges, menstrual blood and other gunk are all acceptable fodder, especially when dried to a crust under the fingernails. "I'm my own garbage disposal. Bodily secretion recycler," she tells us proudly. The passage in which she rips open her own wound to prolong her stay in hospital is even more challenging for the weak-stomached reader. I’m convinced that in contemporary society a lot of women have a very messed-up attitude to their own bodies.
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Charlotte Roche was born in High Wycombe and brought up in Germany. She grew up to become a cool young television presenter who is usually photographed peeping demurely from beneath a fringe, a German Amélie. Seconds later, though, Roche switches from psychotherapeutic solemnity to hilarity when I suggest that she probably didn't want her father to read Helen's fantasies about sleeping with her dad either. Roche has a daughter, Polly, born in 2002, whose father Eric Pfeil [de] was the producer and writer of Roche's program Fast Forward and Der Kindergeburtstag ist vorbei! ("The children's birthday-party is over"). Since 2007, Roche has been married to Martin Keß, co-founder of Brainpool, a media-company in Cologne.
Combine EditionsCharlotte Roche’s books
She broods on her "well-trained pelvic muscles'" and her "very successful" experiences of anal sex. She is fascinated by masturbation, which she appears to believe she invented. "I think a lot of women still don't masturbate, simply because they don't know how to talk about it," Roche told an interviewer. She molests barbecue tongs and avocado pits. (Sometimes, I feel like the only woman in the world who uses the shower attachment for washing my hair.) While masturbating, Helen likes to hum Amazing Grace, which does go to illustrate the incredible diversity of human sexuality. "But I would say everybody is damaged," Roche responds.
Feuchtgebiete, which translates as Wetlands, or Moist Patches, is the debut novel from Charlotte Roche. As it opens, we find 18-year-old narrator Helen Memel in hospital, after an accident shaving her intimate parts. The remainder of the book plays out entirely on the proctology ward where, in between ruminating on her haemorrhoids and sexual proclivities, Helen asks her male nurse to photograph her wound, tries to seduce him, and hides under her bed to masturbate. She has an insatiable, childlike curiosity about the sight and smell and taste of bodies, especially her own. Hygiene, she reflects, "is not a major concern of mine".
Where Musil had a Man Without Qualities, Roche brings us a Woman without Pants. Roche left home in 1993, still aged 17, and formed the garage rock group The Dubinskis with three female friends. The band never released an album, nor recorded any material, nor notably performed anywhere. There followed a period where she undertook anything that would shock and offend people—self-mutilation to paint with blood, drug experiments, or shaving her head. After successfully auditioning for the German music channel VIVA, she worked there for several years as a video jockey and presenter, as well on the sister channel Viva Zwei, where she presented her show Fast Forward.
Although its title conjures up the poetic Fens (it is possible to see why the British publishers avoided the more accurate translation "Moist Areas"), Wetlands takes place entirely in a German hospital room. This room is occupied by Helen Memel, the novel's 18-year-old narrator, who has been admitted with a self-inflicted injury. In the course of shaving her less talkative end, she managed to cut her anus with a razor. The wound festered and now she needs an operation.
While she is stuck in bed, unable to leave until she has a bowel movement, Helen keeps herself occupied reminiscing about her exploits. Kiehl believes that in their preoccupation with receiving sexual pleasure, the older generation of feminists forgot that good sex is all about reciprocity. As a good wife and mother, she indulges her husband's desires, even accompanying him to brothels. The child of a broken marriage, she is determined that her own marriage will "last forever".
We’re obsessed with cleanliness, with getting rid of our natural excretions and our body hair. So I wanted to write about the ugly parts of the human body. In order to tell that story, I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude towards her body – someone who has never even heard that women are supposedly smelly between their legs. Eventually she began shaving again, just "to get rid of the issue", and still does.
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