Wrecked by Charlotte Roche review Books
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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She has a quick, dirty mind, yet somehow or other she seems oddly naïve and very sweet. As soon as she turned 18, she had herself sterilized. She wants to stay in the hospital because she hopes her divorced parents will accidentally visit at the same time and magically recognize they still love each other. The novel's basic premise is that Helen has had sex, feels great about that, and is generally at home and easy with human fluids in a way that the rest of us are not.
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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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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?
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Charlotte Roche has written an uncomfortable, blunt treatise on a young woman’s remarkable exploration of her body and its juices. It is a slimy swim, but one worth taking. First, you have to dive into that filthy concoction. The 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, is in the hospital recuperating from an operation to remove an anal lesion. We get the play-by-play for her poor little posterior, both the events leading up to the lesion and every moment after the operation including the male nurse agreeing to take digital photos of the result and the doctor bringing in a plastic baggy of the detritus he removed.
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 was born in High Wycombe and brought up in Germany. She grew up to become a cool young television presenter who is usually photographed peeping demurely from beneath a fringe, a German Amélie. Seconds later, though, Roche switches from psychotherapeutic solemnity to hilarity when I suggest that she probably didn't want her father to read Helen's fantasies about sleeping with her dad either. Roche has a daughter, Polly, born in 2002, whose father Eric Pfeil [de] was the producer and writer of Roche's program Fast Forward and Der Kindergeburtstag ist vorbei! ("The children's birthday-party is over"). Since 2007, Roche has been married to Martin Keß, co-founder of Brainpool, a media-company in Cologne.
Providers are not able to remove or modify reviews on their own. Reviews can only be removed after an internal review by our customer service team. Generally, Wetlands touches upon a number of taboo topics not only in the sexual arena but also those that can be found in the society at large, particularly in dysfunctional families.
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.
She broods on her "well-trained pelvic muscles'" and her "very successful" experiences of anal sex. She is fascinated by masturbation, which she appears to believe she invented. "I think a lot of women still don't masturbate, simply because they don't know how to talk about it," Roche told an interviewer. She molests barbecue tongs and avocado pits. (Sometimes, I feel like the only woman in the world who uses the shower attachment for washing my hair.) While masturbating, Helen likes to hum Amazing Grace, which does go to illustrate the incredible diversity of human sexuality. "But I would say everybody is damaged," Roche responds.
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.
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