The big to-do in Germany over the Charlotte Roche novel is symptomatic, I guess, of cultural rot -- but it's really about utter despair and spiritual exhaustion, masquerading as a new triumph. From the NYT:
With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Ms. 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, becoming the only German book to top Amazon.com’s global best-seller list.The book, which will be published next year in the United States, 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, and hard to describe in a family newspaper.
“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.
You can't even parody this stuff. And reading the story, you really don't want to. At least I don't. A book like this doesn't become a leviathan bestseller if it doesn't speak to something deep in a culture. More:
“Wetlands” is something different. It is far more anatomical and scatological than erotic. In the interview, Ms. Roche said she wrote scenes specifically to build up arousal, only to bury them again in the repulsive. Lost in the whole hubbub is also a very sad story about a young woman who has undergone family traumas, the emotional core of the novel.The event had something of a circus atmosphere. Some 200 fans showed up at the yellow-and-red-striped tent, paying more than $25 each to hear Ms. Roche read and answer questions. As the signing began, the song “Rivers of Babylon” pumped through the speakers, which, in the book, one of Helen’s lovers sang as an ode to her sexual readiness.
Ardent fans have shown up to her readings with avocados as presents and, in several instances documented in the local media, the unprepared have fainted at some of the scenes. In one of those, Helen describes saving dried semen under her fingernails as “a keepsake” to savor later.
Sex, intentionally frustrated by the artist, who covers it in filth. Like I said, despair. Loathing of life. Hatred of the body masquerading as a liberation of the body. Here's how the story ends:
Alex Bolland, the organizer of the reading, said that the local authorities had made him limit the event to an over-18 audience, but that he was still glad he could book Ms. Roche.“There are almost no taboos today,” Mr. Bolland said. “I appreciate it when someone can show that there are still a few out there.”
Yes, if there's one thing we need nowadays, it's more taboos broken.
For some reason, this reminds me of an exhibition of Weimar-era paintings and drawings that I visited a few years ago at a New York museum with a friend. When we'd gone through the last gallery, she turned to me and said, "You can hear the trains to Auschwitz coming, can't you?" Yes, you could. I don't know what we can hear coming in "Wetlands" and its popularity, but from what I can tell by the press account, it's nothing good.
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MikeN,
Your second sentence lacks a verb and, as a result, makes no sense.
"39 comments on that subject so far, however, most of them gravely disapproving that a woman would dare to write a book about sex."
Come on, Sig -- I think you're too astute to believe that. Does your feminist force-field have to go up over everything related to women and sex? These objections have nothing to do with the fact that a woman is daring to write about sex. Rather they have to do with the perception that the sex involved is perverse and degrading. Some aspects of modern sexuality tend towards the coprophilic, and this book seems to be one example. Yet, this isn't some obscure Asian porn site. It's a major European best-seller.
I have no intention of reading the book, anymore than I intend to read the works of the Marquis DeSade. The few excerpts of the latter that I've read over the years are enough, TYVM. One doesn't need to swim in the cesspool to know that it stinks.
Thanks for the compliment, Rob ("astute")! But perhaps you've failed to realize that "feminism" concerns precisely "everything related to women and sex." Thus the feminist force must indeed exert its mystic power in all such questions. ; )
Alas, unlike many here, I consider myself unqualified to pontificate on a book I haven't read. So my observations are perforce confined to what's been posted about the book. I can't tell from that if the sex is "perverse and degrading" or not. Even if so, I can't see what would make this different from a vast archive of canonical works written by men over hundreds of years, and certainly over the last half-century. In works by such academic standard-bearers as Normal Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, women's bodies have been displayed, plundered, fingered and penetrated in every conceivable way from the male POV, and male authors have pored lovingly over their own sexuality, fantasies, body parts, fluids and secretions. You may deplore this, and you probably do, but it's certainly nothing new.
In An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, for instance, the hero murders his wife, comments with disgust on the appearance of her corpse, then has not-so-consensual anal sex with a female employee. Portnoy's Complaint was cited above. You can't get too much more obsessive about physical secretions than that. Movies are made ("American Pie," "Something about Mary") in which key moments of humor involve the deposition of semen. Yet the world hasn't come to an end, nor has the Fourth Reich returned in triumph.
Has there been much horrified commentary on these things here? Maybe I missed it. They've ruled the whole of Western culture throughout our entire adult lives. Yet this particular book is singled out as remarkably and egregiously threatening to all that Rod and other commenters hold dear. So I have to ask myself why. What is its distinguishing characteristic? All I could come up with is that it's a book written by a woman, about a woman's body and her experience of her own sexuality. It seems there's something uniquely terrifying about that. I can't see why, but y'know, I've got my feminist force-field up so maybe that explains it. If you have another explanation, I'd like to hear it.
Heh. I just realized that I misspelled Norman Mailer's name, above. Is Norman Normal? I leave the reader to ponder.
"The Nazi atrocities were not caused by the artists in any way. But, the art accurately captured and communicated the culture of that time period (in a sense, the artists were doing their job). So, when viewing the art display, one had a clear sense of the German culture of that time and maybe why it was so susceptible to nazism. It is not about assigning blame to any persons. It is about describing how sometimes nihilist cultures set the table for unimaginably bad things."
Well then, shouldn't you all be encouraging the creation of art like this, rather than criticizing it? I mean if (as you claim) the consternation is caused not by the writer, or by the text, but the nature of the culture that is reflects, you should want this seen by everyone. Essentially, by your logic, the author is merely reporting on the dangerous state of the culture, like Upton Sinclair reporting on the dangerous state of the meatpacking industry. That was pretty unsavory as well, but if the situation is as dire as the title of this post indicates, a little unpleasantness is a small price to pay to bring the it to the attention of the public. Because the first step in fixing a problem is letting people know that a problem exists, yes?
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