Product Description

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. Since its debut in February, the novel ('Feuchtgebiete', in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, and is the biggest selling book on Amazon anywhere in the world. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9252 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 225 pages

Review
'Profoundly unsettling' Rowan Pelling, Daily Mail

'If you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you!This is not a beautiful or perfect book, but an enterprising one, and its cumulative effect is admirable!Our bodies mean a lot to us -- even the asshole, about which far too little has been written. Every writer needs to claim a bit of territory, and assholes are there for the grabbing. Boldly, Roche takes them for her own' Guardian

'"Wetlands", in the tradition of Plath's "The Bell Jar", is a remarkable novel about mental illness that has been mistaken for feminist literature' Alice O'Keefe, New Statesman 'The cause of the fuss is the novel's extreme obscenity -- though "obscenity" doesn't quite catch the particular, pungent flavour of the thing. "Grunginess" is nearer the mark' Adam Lively, Sunday Times

'Literary news this week suggests that when it comes to women writing about sex, reviewers are still reacting in the same way as Dr Johnson to his walking dog, surprised that it's being done at all. So hats off to Charlotte Roche, who has managed to give both the "Sunday Times" and the "Guardian" the willies by cheerfully confessing to consuming pornography with her husband and starting her book "Wetlands" with a graphic discussion of hemorrhoids' Lisa Hilton, Spectator

'Maeve Binchy is famous for her unique humour and insight; Cecelia Ahern is popular for her unlikely twists and touches of magic; Charlotte Roche has a different formula for success -- haemorrhoids, hairy armpits and halitosis, mixed together into an unlikely erotic pot-pourri' Irish Independent

'Graphic, brutal scatological glimpse of one young woman's sexual proclivities!Helen celebrates shattering sexual and social taboos in a way others might only dream of' London Lite

'Carrying "Wetlands" around with me over the past few days, I have bumped into quite a few people who imagine, from all the publicity, that it is a steamy sex-romp of the type few of us can resist. But I have had to disappoint them. Steamy it may be, but the steam comes from something less attractive than sex; in a characteristic phrase, Roche describes the smell coming from her bowels as being "like warm pus mixed with diarrhoea and something acidic"' Craig Brown, Spectator

'As the furore surrounding the publication of "Wetlands" has shown, there's a very vocal segment of the population ready to accuse women who embrace pornography of some sort of treachery' The List

From the Inside Flap
Helen Memel lies in the Department of Internal Medicine at Maria Hilf Hospital. While she waits for her divorced parents to come and visit her - who she hopes will finally be reconciled by the side of her hospital bed - she begins to examine those parts of her body usually seen as distinctly 'unladylike'. She lets the orderly, Robin, take photos of those areas her curious gaze can't reach. And, on the side, she tends to her collection of avocado stones - which also happen to provide her with invaluable sexual services ...

Wetlands takes an unflinching, and very funny, look at one of the last remaining taboos of today. Courageous, radical and provocative, Charlotte Roche's novel rebels against hygiene hysteria, the sterile aesthetics of women's magazines and standardized dealings with the female body and its sexuality. This is a wonderfully wild story of a heroine both pleasure-seeking and vulnerable, who voices what others do not even dare to think.

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

Story of a very damaged young woman
I read this because I wanted to make up my own mind about the controversy it has generated, but the book is actually very different from what I had expected from all the reviews. Yes, it is gross and completely disgusting in lots of places, to the point where there were pages I had to skim through since they were so stomach-churning.

But at heart this is a story of Helen, an emotionally-damaged eighteen-year old, scarred by her family, sexually-promiscuous but lonely, and screaming her pain through her defiant and rebellious relationship to her own body. Like a seven-year old, she thinks she's being clever and shocking, but what gradually builds up in this short book is not a sense of empathy but of pity.

Charlotte Roche isn't Helen, but she has created a monstrously vivid anti-heroine. I can completely understand the people who have slated this book for its repellent and sometimes nauseating episodes, but I can also understand their necessity in defining who and what Helen is. So not a pleasant book to read, but ultimately a brave and interesting one.

Nothing's shocking
Ok, so i bought this after reading an interview with the author in the Guardian. I liked the idea of a book that dealt with female sexuality in an honest and funny way. Unfortunately this book was a massive disappointment.

Although graphic in her detail of bodily parts, fluids and functions, Helen, who tells her whole story from her hospital room, bored me after a while. She is one dimensional - immature and desperate to shock - rather like this book. The subplot about her family secrets was flat and predictable, and i was desperate to find something exciting about this, but nothing came.

It would maybe have had more impact as a short story, but over the course of a whole book, it was a chore to read and unsatisfying to finish.

Controversial ?
Is this really the bestselling book that Amazon distributes? I find that staggering. I wouldn't say that this book is particularly shocking, it clearly sets out to be (could the title and cover be more obvious?), but in the opinion of this reviewer it is trying too hard, lacked depth and I found myself yawning at the obviousness to try and 'shock' the reader. Perhaps in its original language this book was something of a revelation, but in the UK a drawn out tale of a teenagers behaviour changes and habits following their parents' divorce is hardly ground breaking, and I believe there are better ways of telling that story than the context used here.

Without the 'controversial' content 'Wetlands' would be very short story and a thin book, in many ways comparable to many generic Hollywood blockbuster films that take themselves too seriously. Take away the special effects, stunts and explosions and you are left with very little, it is over very quickly and you are left feeling unfulfilled at the end and desire something with greater substance and originality.

If you must waste three hours of your life reading this, borrow a copy and save your money.