Wetlands opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. Since its debut in February, the novel ("Feuchtgebiete," in German) has sold more than a million copies, and is the biggest selling book on Amazon anywhere in the world. Not funny, not moving, not provocative and certainly not titillating, Wetlands is just extraordinarily gross.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. Parts of the book are affecting, but it doesn't take an articulate voice to make a description of reopening a wound in an anus nauseating. Is Helen, obsessed with sex and bodily excretions, determinedly holding out against the apparent fascism of the feminist hygiene industry by neglecting to wash her lady parts? Or is she a young girl, distraught at the break-up of her family, suffering from a mental illness so severe her account could bear comparison with The Bell Jar? Sadly, the reality is less interesting. It is narrated by Helen, an 18-year-old girl, from a hospital room where she is being treated for an infected anus after a shaving accident. It has triggered a global debate about whether it is art or porn, and contains descriptions so disturbing that people have fainted at readings.
At one point in 2008 the original German novel was the world's bestselling book.
O n many levels, Wetlands is extraordinary.
0 kommentar(er)
