‘If she really knew how beautiful she was, she would hardly have met up with him, so it was best not to tell her.’Fiction by Lukas Maisel, translated by Ruth Martin. ‘From a dish washer to an author who writes about washing dishes.’Memoir by Ilija Matusko, translated by Jen Calleja.
Early life
Any doctor or provider who claims their profile by verifying themselves can update their information and provide additional data on their specialties, education, accepted insurances, conditions they treat, and procedures they perform. It is easy to be put off by the hype surrounding this novel. The author, Charlotte Roche, is a television personality in Germany, host of an MTV-type show.
Wetlands (novel)
The presence of the parents provokes corny psychology lessons on dysfunctional families, and Helen's originality and ingenuity seem less remarkable when attributed to family trauma. Why doesn't Roche bravely proclaim her heroine's outlook NORMAL? Let Helen be promiscuous, impetuous and insubordinate because she wants to be, not because there's anything wrong with her or her childhood. Her previous hospital stays include a bout of appendicitis she faked in order to postpone a French exam, and a sterilisation her mother knows nothing about. She's pretty angry at her mother, not just about the divorce, but about other crimes too, from mild maternal interference to suicide attempts.
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Where Musil had a Man Without Qualities, Roche brings us a Woman without Pants. Roche left home in 1993, still aged 17, and formed the garage rock group The Dubinskis with three female friends. The band never released an album, nor recorded any material, nor notably performed anywhere. There followed a period where she undertook anything that would shock and offend people—self-mutilation to paint with blood, drug experiments, or shaving her head. After successfully auditioning for the German music channel VIVA, she worked there for several years as a video jockey and presenter, as well on the sister channel Viva Zwei, where she presented her show Fast Forward.
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I wanted to find my own style – and that involved annoying a lot of people at first. While I couldn’t stand literature at school, I was very much into drama and made sure that I always got the best roles in my school plays. I could never remember the right facts for my exams, but I always knew my lines for the school play.
Charlotte Roche offers sex (with strings attached) to Germany's president Wulff
She has no qualms about public bathrooms, the toilet seats or even the floors, and she is proud that she rarely bathes. “Obviously that means I never wash my face either. I think it’s overrated anyway.” Everything she does is a test to see whether the old wives’ tales are true and if bacterium is really such a terrible thing.
Personal details
Wetlands, Roche says, had originally been intended as a serious polemic against the tyranny of female sexual hygiene. Unsurprisingly, Helen’s obsessions turn out to be a reaction to her parents’ divorce, and to her parents themselves. Her mother is so averse to bodily function that she claims not to have bowel movements, while her father is unashamed to give her a get-well “hemorrhoid pillow.” Neither talks about her mother’s attempt to kill herself and Helen’s brother when Helen was a child.
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.
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.
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.
Most patients would subside into misery and humiliation afterwards, desperately awaiting release - either from "the ass ward" or from life itself. But Helen, despite a fear of never having a working sphincter again, embarks on an amorous pursuit of one of the nurses, and a campaign to spread her blood, germs and pee throughout the hospital. In drips and oozes, her real story emerges. She is the completely neglected child of two repressed and depressed people. She doesn’t know what her father does for work. She has memories she does not trust and a recurring vision of an event that could not have occurred.
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.
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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