Wetlands
A Novel
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3.2 • 17 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A sexual, scatological, international sensation: "A cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women's world" (Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times).
In the tradition of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and Melissa P.'s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Charlotte Roche's debut novel—which sold more than a million copies in Germany alone—exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma.
Helen Memel is an outspoken eighteen-year-old, whose childlike stubbornness is offset by a precocious sexual confidence. From a hospital bed, where she's recovering from an operation and lamenting her parents' divorce, Helen ruminates on her past sexual and physical adventures in "a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct—both physical and psychological—of Helen's body and mind" (The New York Times).
Punky alienated teenager, young woman reclaiming her body from the tyranny of repressive hygiene (women mustn't smell, excrete, desire), bratty smartass, lonely daughter, shock merchant, and pleasure seeker—Helen is all of these things and more, and her frequent attempts to assert her maturity ultimately prove just how fragile, confused, and young she truly is.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roche's explicit and provocative debut about an 18-year-old girl with a very active sex life was a bona fide sensation in Germany upon its publication earlier this year. Helen Memel, hospitalized for the treatment of an infected anal lesion, spends much of the novel in the hospital scheming on how to reunite her divorced parents. Between visits by hospital staff and her family, Helen shares her vast sexual experience, details how she rebels against her mother's uptightness by reveling in excretions, and maintains a high level of curiosity about her own body (and, of course, others'). Among the graphic sex scenes and tidbits on her avocado tree growing hobby, Helen dishes gnarly stories about leaving a used tampon in an elevator, dribbling a trail of urine from the bathroom to her bed and eating scabs. Through Helen's mix of eroticism and profanity, Memel attacks conventional views on women's hygiene, sexuality and the definition of femininity. Though there isn't much plot it feels largely like a buffet of filth and screwing Helen's take on life is enough to keep the pages turning.
Customer Reviews
Bold— Brash femininity with disgust!
I wish the book ended a bit differently but i loved the way things were explained in this novel:
Helen, our narrator, an 18yo girl with strange, gross-out type hygienic quirks goes on her journey of being in a proctology ward after a shaving gone wrong, longing to get her divorced parents together with this surgery happening. She talks about her life, ideations, in much detail you wouldn’t see anywhere else in much books these days wrote so real. I enjoyed.