Wetlands - Tapa dura

"Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-eighteen audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best-seller Wetlands . . . 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. . . . With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel's eighteen-year-old narrator, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. . . . 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."--Nicholas Kulish, "The New York Times " "An explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," the perversion of J.G. Ballard's "Crash" and the feminist agenda of Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch." . . . ["Wetlands"] hasn't been out of Germany's newspapers since publication."--Philip Oltermann, "Granta" "Using language explicit enough to make the Mayflower Madam blush . . . the sassy if confessional tone [of Wetlands] introduces a 21st century Lolita whose bravado is slowly chipped away. . . . Intense . . . Exhilarating, moving, sad, and scary."--"Library Journal" "A sharply-written, taboo-busting black comedy, both gross and engrossing. . . . [Helen Memmel] is Florence Nightingale's worst nightmare. . . . "Wetlands," in the tradition of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," is a remarkable novel about mental illness that has been mistaken for feminist literature."--Alice O'Keefe, "Newstatesman" "'Provocative' is one of those publishing buzzwords reflexively used to stir up interest in the most banal of books. [But for "Wetlan

In a sexually and anatomically explicit novel, Roche exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma.