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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".
I can only wish that the young women who think “Wetlands” sounds intriguing will head to the erotica section of the nearest women’s bookstore first. Laid out on a hospital bed, bottom bare to the breeze, Helen ruminates at length on her body and its products. Occasionally, some oafish doctor comes in and says something oafish (this part is quite believable). Sometimes, Helen is in pain and sometimes she is hungry. But mostly, she thinks, in the great German tradition.
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Helen chooses to see her much duller father as utterly blameless - apart from the way he used to administer sun cream, leaving white question marks on her sunburnt back every summer. In quieter moments she tends her avocado garden, which she forced her mother to transport to the hospital. A row of avocado pits stand sentinel to our heroine's antics and, apart from being used occasionally as dildos, strike a quiet, restrained note in contrast to Helen's feverish mixture of horniness, confusion, indignation and bloody-minded good cheer. Recently someone in the audience at a reading suggested that perhaps the war isn’t over after all, that the Allies were merely concentrating on getting their offspring to write porno propaganda to confuse the German people. Me flying over Germany, throwing sex bombs into people’s minds.
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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.
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.
Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish. I find Roche's brand of bloody-minded emotional openness inspiring. If women's liberation means freeing us to be more truly ourselves, we should celebrate a writer like Roche, whose voice is defiantly, shamelessly her own.
Charlotte Roche offers sex (with strings attached) to Germany's president Wulff
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".
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.
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Wetlands by Charlotte Roche - PopMatters
Wetlands by Charlotte Roche.
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Charlotte Roche was born in 1978 in High Wycombe, but was brought up and lives in Germany. She has been a highly respected presenter on the German equivalent of MTV. Anyway, never again should a true Brit complain about Germans draping their towels over sun loungers. When visiting public lavatories, Helen likes to "rub the entire seat with my pussy before I sit down". "I've never had a single infection," she adds, reassuringly. The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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