Table Of Content
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.
Writing
"At the moment I just feel the pressure so strongly, and I don't understand why it's there. So I want to talk about it." At public readings women often tell her they daren't have sex with their husbands if they have not shaved their legs for one day. Roche's mother was a feminist, the sort of mum who talked about contraception and allowed her daughter to have sex at home from an early age. No one has ever brought it up in an interview, either. When I started out as a presenter, I wanted to do television in a way in which no one has ever done television before.
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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.
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She has a quick, dirty mind, yet somehow or other she seems oddly naïve and very sweet. As soon as she turned 18, she had herself sterilized. She wants to stay in the hospital because she hopes her divorced parents will accidentally visit at the same time and magically recognize they still love each other. The novel's basic premise is that Helen has had sex, feels great about that, and is generally at home and easy with human fluids in a way that the rest of us are not.
British-German television presenter and author / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
When she uses public toilets, she likes to rub her vagina around the lavatory seat, and she has experimented with "long periods of not washing my pussy", to investigate its erotic impact - dabbing her own personal pubic perfume behind her earlobes. "It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek." There is a lot of talk about this novel being a manifesto on the female body and sexuality, an updated and 21st century “Fear of Flying.” Helen is open and adventurous and willing to explore any new avenue -- so to speak -- and she revels in her desire and need for gratification. Certainly, she has no fear of discussing her body and asking for what she wants. There is nothing coy or cute about her, not with the men and women she hooks up with, or the doctors and nurses she deals with during her hospital stay.
Already troubled by a complicated family history, Kiehl has been left a "wounded animal" by the accident. She is suicidal yet terrified of death, and clings to sanity for the sake of her husband and seven-year-old daughter with the help of thrice-weekly sessions with Frau Drescher, her therapist. Roche certainly knows how to write a memorable opening scene.
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.
I wanted to point out how a lot of the emancipatory principles from the ’60s and ’70s have not yet arrived properly. In that respect, this book really is a manifesto, and I do think it has a serious message. "Yes, you're right, it would have been more logical if she had had hair. But you see, the book started off very political. But then it got very unpolitical, it just happened."
Publishers battle to sign up Europe's sex sensation
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.
Evidently cleanliness for health is a myth, because other than her unusual condition, she is incredibly hearty and resilient. The major part of Wetlands is made up of Helen's thoughts, reminiscences and sexual fantasies while confined to her hospital bed. A sexually active woman since she was fifteen, she has had sex with many men and boys and describes herself as continuously randy. Shortly after her 18th birthday she had herself sterilised without telling her parents about it. To that end, “Wetlands” is narrated by 18-year-old Helen Memel, who has been suffering from an anal lesion after an intimate shaving incident. The entire book takes place on the proctology unit as she recovers from surgery.
But people often assume it was something I did as a sort of glamorous part-time job to support my writing career – that’s a very German approach, perhaps. I used to read a lot in my early teens, even some of the classics, but it was all ruined for me by those German classes in which we had to take writing apart. And now that I’m a mother – my child was born five years ago – it’s just very difficult to find the time for reading. The only book I have read recently is the The Great Gatsby and even that took me almost three years. Roche, 30, was born in High Wycombe, but moved with her British parents to Germany as a young child, and has been a national celebrity there since her teens, presenting music and culture shows.
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.
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.
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.
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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