Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

Charlotte Roche is a literary phenomenon. In April last year, she was the first German author to top Amazon’s monthly bestseller. Her debut novel, Wetlands, has sold half a million copies at home and is so sexually explicit that people are said to have fainted at readings.

The book definitely instigates a strong stomach, discussing, as it does, the narrator’s sexual preferences in instant detail, but is it cleverly packaged pornography (in its original language its called Feuchtgebiete and its reported as being a German porn novel) or an erotic classic? Furthermore, why have so many people chosen to read a novel that breaks all the conventional barriers of taste?
The most exposing piece in the novel, however, is not about sex. Description of Helen’s mother: “Mom’s afraid of the natural world and her knowledge of it. She always seems to be fighting against it. She fights against dirt in the household. She fights against various insects. In the garden, too. Fights against bacteria of all kinds. Against sex. Against men and women.” (Roche has asked her parents not to read Wetlands!).
The book is a rashly drop by every fissure and consequence, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind. It is difficult to the overplay obscenity of the novel. Wetlands beginning in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen’s haemorrhoid’s, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and – here is where the debate kicks in – just possibly female empowerment. Obviously, the novel has struck a nerve, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women’s roles and image in society.
The novel’s heroine explores her own orifices with the courageousness of a medieval adventurer; Helen’s vagina, anus and bodily secretions fascinate her, to a degree, that will not unavoidably be shared by every reader. The novel’s opening sentence, an admission that Helen has always suffered from haemorrhoids, signals that nothing is off limits. Forced to rest while her doctors wait for her to defecate successfully after the operation, Helen exposes her unusual attitude to personal hygiene, which includes smearing secretions from her vagina behind her ears as a substitute for perfume: “It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek.”

Today disputes about pornography have moved from the law courts to the literary events, where the combustion question is whether writing that stimulates sexual arousal can also be literature. Feminists entered the debate long ago, denouncing commercially produced pornography and the relentless sexualization of violence in popular culture. Their object was not the description of sex, but the objectification and retaliation of women that so often accompanies it, and a generation of feminist novelists set about liberating female sexuality from this depressing confines. Wetlands has definitely continued debate about pornography. Every few years a novel appears that challenges the constantly shifting boundaries on writing about sex, and in recent years the author of the work in question has often been a woman.
However, I think that Wetlands goes beyond porn. Post-porn perhaps? It is an important book that pushes social borderlines and intensities us to reframe female sexuality and reconsider our relationship to our own bodies and their functions. Roche is an author who challenges and Wetlands is a challenging book that will be disregarded by some as unnecessarily shocking and intentionally provocative.

“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.” — Sallie Tisdale, in the Times on Sunday.

Roche, 30, was born in England – High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, in fact -but moved to Germany with her English parents when she was a child and speaks English with a slight accent. Her parents divorced when she was 5, an event that (as we shall see) has had a lasting impact on her life. She was an early developer and became a TV star in her teens, making her name on the German equivalent of MTV where she became notable for late-night interviews in which she asked female celebrities about their sexual fantasies.

Enjoy!

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