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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.
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No one in her family communicates -- even when they visit. It soon becomes apparent that Helen is so desperately into her bodily functions and pleasures because no one else -- not a lover and definitely not her mother or father -- is actually interested in her. You have to make your own way.” In the end, no pun intended, she makes an interesting choice that works out better than anyone would expect.
What to Read
Back in 1965, Norman Mailer in “An American Dream” devotes at least a chapter to the subject in a celebration and embrace of the scandalous. But young Helen, though she speaks with bravado and pretends nothing she does is a big deal, really wants to challenge us and force us to question our beliefs. The book begins as if Helen is making fun of us, putting us down for our prudish attention to hygiene.
The Punk Force Is Strong in German Gross-Out Film Wetlands - Vulture
The Punk Force Is Strong in German Gross-Out Film Wetlands.
Posted: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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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.
Granta 166: Generations Online
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.
SIMILAR PROVIDERS
Her debut novel, Wetlands, which was published in her native Germany in 2008 and went on to become a worldwide bestseller, began with an 11-page description of the protagonist accidentally slicing into her haemorrhoids while shaving. Wrecked starts with a similarly detailed account of oral sex, which could well be described as "blow-by-blow". But I suspect such depths did not occur to Roche, who insists that “Wetlands” is a celebration of the female body. She does seem to have hitched a ride on the zeitgeist — the book is being translated into 27 languages.
And she seems like such a nice girl...
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.
To bodily go ...
Helen entertains herself by remembering varied sex acts, obsessing over bodily fluids and playing pranks on the hospital workers. I’m afraid I don’t think England is any better than America in that respect. In terms of body-culture, England is always quick to follow the latest trends in the States. And it always amuses me how Americans and English people will to this day continue to make jokes about German women having hairy armpits. These days, German women shave themselves too, you know. And don’t worry, I don’t think just because they read my book they will suddenly stop doing so.
RATINGS AND REVIEWS
She must have been delighted when Schwarzer responded to the book with an open letter ticking her off for advocating a patriarchal view of sex ("you don't have the solution, but the problem"). For me, she is advocating mutual generosity – which need not mean booking yourself into the nearest brothel. The protagonist, Elizabeth Kiehl, is in bed with her husband. "I don't grab his cock at first. I reach down farther – to his balls. I cradle them in my hand like a pouch full of gold." Blimey. His magazine has drooped; he is picking his nose and staring into space. "It's all about making him happy … I want to drive him absolutely wild. First, let's tease him a little …" Reading this book is like visiting another planet, but I think I should go there more often.
When the book was originally rejected by a German publisher on the grounds of being pornographic, Roche insisted to them that it was no such thing. But she admits the defensiveness was somewhat disingenuous. The only difficult part was inventing new names for the components of female genitalia - such as "pearl trunk" for the clitoris, and "lady fingers" for labia. Women and their rear ends are not a new subject. Former ballet dancer Toni Bentley wrote “The Surrender” in 2004, her memoir about sodomy that was appalling in a different and, frankly, less interesting way.
She has a quick, dirty mind, yet somehow or other she seems oddly naïve and very sweet. As soon as she turned 18, she had herself sterilized. She wants to stay in the hospital because she hopes her divorced parents will accidentally visit at the same time and magically recognize they still love each other. The novel's basic premise is that Helen has had sex, feels great about that, and is generally at home and easy with human fluids in a way that the rest of us are not.
I wanted to point out how a lot of the emancipatory principles from the ’60s and ’70s have not yet arrived properly. In that respect, this book really is a manifesto, and I do think it has a serious message. "Yes, you're right, it would have been more logical if she had had hair. But you see, the book started off very political. But then it got very unpolitical, it just happened."
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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