It starts as it means to continue: ”Ever since I could think, I’ve had haemorrhoids.” And through the next 229 unflinchingly explicit pages, there is little respite.
Feuchtgebiete, which translates as ”wetlands” or ”humid zones”, is the first book by 30-year-old High Wycombe-born Charlotte Roche. For fans it is an erotic literary classic and an exploration of contemporary concepts of cleanliness and sex and femininity; for critics it is crude and cleverly marketed pornography. Either way it has already sold half a million copies in Germany and is now heading for British bookshops.
Wetlands, which has beaten Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and Ken Follett’s latest to the top of Amazon’s international sales list, has sparked a frenzy among major British publishers. Roche’s German publishers last week refused to speak to the Observer or to arrange an interview with Roche to avoid pre-empting what is expected to be a massive UK deal and publicity campaign. ”No, nothing, impossible,” they said.
For whether it is the fantasies about sex, the polemics against the use of deodorants, the avocado cores grown specially for use in masturbation, or the detailed and inventive passages of scatological or genital description, Wetlands has left few indifferent.
French magazines have run articles on ”taboos and literature”, Swiss papers have worried about moral corruption and, after seven weeks at the top of the bestseller list in Germany, no one is tiring of the debate. Der Spiegel summed up the message of the book as ”I stink therefore I am” — a reference both to the heroine’s distaste for personal hygiene and her sexual fantasies about bodily odours.
Roche herself, whose father moved to Mönchengladbach to build factories for Mars, is unfazed by the label ”pornography”. ”That’s fine with me,” she told an interviewer from Granta, the literary magazine. ”I wanted to write about the female body in a way that is funny and entertaining, but also sexy … But it’s more than just porn. For a start, … it’s also quite disgusting. So when you read the book and you get a bit too excited, you’ll immediately get turned off again.”
The heroine of Wetlands is Helen Memel, an opinionated, outspoken 18-year-old who is as articulate as she is sexually confident. After a failed attempt to shave her intimate parts, Helen ends up in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Maria Hilf Hospital. She remains in the ward for the rest of the novel, surrounded by surgical instruments and machines, mentally exploring her body and those of other women.
”I wanted to present the whole package,” said Roche. ”Women aren’t just a sexy presentation space, they also get ill, they have to go to the toilet, they bleed. If you love someone and sleep with them, you’ll have to face those dirty bits — otherwise you might as well not get started with the business of sex in the first place.”
According to Dr Claudia Neusüss of Berlin’s Humboldt University, one reason for the book’s German success is its role as a ”counterweight” to TV shows such as Germany’s Next Top Model, hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum.
”Young women are under an enormous pressure to have a serious career, to be beautiful, to have a perfect body and a rich sexuality before having their first child and the book shows that there is a different way of dealing with your body,” Neusüss told the Observer. ”This book will be understood in any country where there is a similar relationship to cleanness of the body, to hygiene, to bodily functions in general.”
Neusüss said she was touched by the mixture of humour and tenderness in the book. ”I think it is liberating that she is writing about masturbation, anal intercourse, sexuality, sickness, about things you don’t talk about in public,” she said. ”People like to discuss it, people like to write about it. Even me, I look at an avocado core differently since reading Wetlands.”
For others the book is a new feminist manifesto. ”I think she hit a nerve within society,” said Dr Ulla Egbringhoff, an author and journalist. ”What is it about young women? What problems do they have? They need something new. And Charlotte Roche is certainly filling a gap there.”
Roche, married and with a six-year-old daughter, has been a well-known media personality in Germany for years. Late-night interview programmes — Kylie Minogue and Uma Thurman have been among celebrity guests — on cultural channels and acting roles have assured a continually high profile and controversy. A trademark is questioning female guests about their sexual fantasies. ”Women have no language for their desire,” Roche has said. ”When it comes to their bodies, women are uptight.”
Roche’s British origins have, however, influenced the reactions of some to her work.
”I was born in 1978, to English parents, in High Wycombe — which is ironic given that that’s the place from which all the RAF bombers bound for Germany took off in the Second World War,” Roche told Granta. ”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. I love that image. Me flying over Germany, throwing sex bombs into people’s minds.” – guardian.co.uk Â