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.
Wetlands (novel)
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.
Books
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.
Combine EditionsCharlotte Roche’s books
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.
More on Granta.com
The presence of the parents provokes corny psychology lessons on dysfunctional families, and Helen's originality and ingenuity seem less remarkable when attributed to family trauma. Why doesn't Roche bravely proclaim her heroine's outlook NORMAL? Let Helen be promiscuous, impetuous and insubordinate because she wants to be, not because there's anything wrong with her or her childhood. Her previous hospital stays include a bout of appendicitis she faked in order to postpone a French exam, and a sterilisation her mother knows nothing about. She's pretty angry at her mother, not just about the divorce, but about other crimes too, from mild maternal interference to suicide attempts.
Mavis Leno joins husband Jay at a premiere after dementia revelation: ‘I feel great’
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.
Roche has a five-year-old daughter, and so I ask if she hopes she will grow up to share Helen's relationship with her own body. Her father, like Helen's, was an engineer - he built factories for Mars in Germany - and her parents divorced when she was five. "Like all children of divorce," her poignant prologue reads, "I want to see my parents back together." She made them both promise not to read the book, and has since wondered whether subconsciously it was the protagonist's preoccupation with divorce she wanted to protect them from. Let’s face it; who of us hasn’t checked the tissue after a sneeze, peered into the toilet bowl, picked at a scab to see what was underneath?
Personal details
Why can't Charlotte Roche stop writing about sex? - The Times
Why can't Charlotte Roche stop writing about sex?.
Posted: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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.
Personal life
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment