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.
Charlotte Roche revisits mix of sex and controversy in new novel, Schossgebete
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.
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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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".
Personal life
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".
Book Review: Charlotte Roche's"Wetlands" -- Ick. Just Ick. - artsfuse.org
Book Review: Charlotte Roche's"Wetlands" -- Ick. Just Ick..
Posted: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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.
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.
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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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.
What to Read
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.
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.
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.
Thirty-year-old Charlotte Roche, born in High Wycombe but raised in Germany, has been a recognizable face in her adopted home country since she started working as a presenter on Viva, the German equivalent of MTV, in the mid-1990s. She went on to write and present programmes and late-night talk shows for Arte and ZDF, and won the highly respected Grimme Prize for television in 2004. But only now that she has written her first book are people ready to take her seriously.
"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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