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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".
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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.
To bodily go ...
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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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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.
Wetlands (novel)
Surrounded by surgical instruments and humming X-ray machines, she reflects in ever more uncomfortable detail on the eccentric wonders of the female body. It’s an explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the perversion of J.G. Ballard’s Crash and the feminist agenda of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
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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.
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.
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 opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids, 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. Clearly the novel has struck a nerve, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women's roles and image in society.
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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.
Although its title conjures up the poetic Fens (it is possible to see why the British publishers avoided the more accurate translation "Moist Areas"), Wetlands takes place entirely in a German hospital room. This room is occupied by Helen Memel, the novel's 18-year-old narrator, who has been admitted with a self-inflicted injury. In the course of shaving her less talkative end, she managed to cut her anus with a razor. The wound festered and now she needs an operation.
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.
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