Charlotte Roche Author of Feuchtgebiete
Table Of Content
So we learn that Helen had herself secretly sterilized as soon as she reached majority, and now grows avocados instead of babies. She masturbates with the pits and simulates giving birth to them. “Eggs are a constant theme with me,” she says, before describing how one of her partners experiments with hard-boiled ones. A lot of the critical confusion about how to read the book probably stems from Roche's appealing determination not to be "an author who takes herself too seriously". But it is, for all the humour, a serious feminist book.
To bodily go ...
Charlotte Roche: 'I don't like taboos in sexuality' - BBC.com
Charlotte Roche: 'I don't like taboos in sexuality'.
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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.
Writing
‘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.
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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.
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.
Personal life
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.
More on Granta.com
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.
About the author (
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.
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.
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 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".
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 has no qualms about public bathrooms, the toilet seats or even the floors, and she is proud that she rarely bathes. “Obviously that means I never wash my face either. I think it’s overrated anyway.” Everything she does is a test to see whether the old wives’ tales are true and if bacterium is really such a terrible thing.
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.
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."
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.
"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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