Wrecked
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The sensational new novel from Charlotte Roche, author of ‘Wetlands’
Replete with a forty page descriptions of marital sex, details of worms, and even, following an abortion, ‘the best anal sex ever’, Schossgebete reannounces Charlotte Roche.
We witness the sexual routine of Elizabeth Kiehl, our protagonist, in all its minutiae: her love of fellatio; her visits to prostitutes together with husband Georg in order to keep their relationship alive; and – most candidly – her preference for dressing him in old men’s clothes because of her self-diagnosed ‘father fixation’.
Behind such banal titillation is great sadness. Midway through one of her weekly therapy sessions, Kiehl takes us back to a period a decade earlier, when she was eagerly anticipating her wedding in England, her birthplace. Arriving at the airport in London, Elizabeth’s father calls to tell her that her mother and three younger brothers have been involved in a high-speed pile-up on the Autobahn, the latter three left dead. It emerges that the crash was so brutal that there were no physical remains of her three siblings found.
And so Elizabeth Kiehl’s past and present continue side-by-side as she heads towards psychological collapse.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Controversial German author Roche (Wetlands) delivers a complicated take on literary erotica where sex is more than titilation. Over three days the neurotic Elizabeth Kiehl mentally and physically prepares to visit a brothel with her husband Georg. Her crippling obsessions going to therapy, pleasing her husband sexually, being the perfect mother to her daughter Liza, and saving the environment all stem from a car accident that killed her three brothers, who were en route to her wedding, and her hatred of the paparazzi who terrorized her family afterwards. It is hard to differentiate between Roche's potentially groundbreaking expansion of female subjectivity in fiction and what is merely included to see how much she can get away with, but it is precisely the blurring of this line which makes her work so fascinating. Although trying shock, bemuse, and perhaps even enrage, Roche also attempts to explore the multitude of contradictory pressures middle class women face in the early 21st century, seen through the sharply focused, yet irredeemably skewed, lens of a mentally ill, and therefore unreliable, narrator. Although the content may trouble many readers, Roche's particularly explicit brand of Molly Bloom-esque, serpentine inner monologue is worth a read for those who can stomach it.
