Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

For a couple of weeks I've reading all over the british press about Wetlands, a novel that will be taking the country by storm this month, and I can't bloody wait to get my hands on a copy. It has already done the whole brouhaha in Germany, where the author Charlotte Roche - born in England but raised in Cologne - has originally published this little controversial volume. Apparently, the novel is about an 18-year-old girl who has been hospitalised after a shaving episode gone wrong - which is kind hilarious - and goes on about her sex escapades while still in hospital - which made me raise an eyebrow - to her weird hygiene habits which include rubbing her genital parts in public toilets - NOW, that's got my attention.

In terms of books and films revolving about sex, I've always had this feeling that it would take a LOT of creativity to make me interested (full-on porn, animal and scatological fetish need not apply - they belong in the "yuck" category, which means I will look at out of curiosity before scrunching my face in distaste. Pedophilia is absolutely out of question). The last films I remember being attracted by were Bitter Moon and Last Tango in Paris, maybe Eyes Wide Shut and The Dreamers. Books... I can't remember much other then Susana Moore's In The Cut, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and maybe some of Anaïs Nin's work. I was never interested in that french bestseller written by a certain Catherine M, nor the real-life sex adventures of ladettes and middle-class girls turned strippers.

I think my taboos have been broken quite early in life.

But THIS book is something else.

The author says she started with an idea to comment on society's obsession with female cleanliness and it evolved into an altogether study of all things supposedly stomach-churning for the average individual: hemorrhoids, "smegma", "slime", and other detailed description of bodily fluids and Helen's (the protagonist) straightforward relationship with sex and her own body.

I suppose doctors won't find any of this too out of the ordinary, but I'm quite interested in what kind of impact this book is going to cause now that so much visual information is available and so many moral values don't stand their worth.

I'm ordering my copy right now.

This idea goes hand-in-hand with my new approach to life

The point, as [Virginia] Woolf suggests in Orlando, is the thrilling experience of the present moment. Everything else is a sort of dry dust that falls away, insignificant and distracting. Many of Woolf's famous works move fro character to character, moment to moment, attempting to capture and renew the sense of wonder that exists apart from and inside of social, cultural, and political arrangements. Woolf is, in this sense, apolitical. But in another sense she is very political, because the logical outcome of her method is a radical democratizing of the novel. No consciousness is privileged. No class, no degree of virtue or talent, no amount of money, no uniqueness of perspective gets to own the depiction of consciousness. [...] The author's job is to preserve exceptional moments, no to award them to exceptional people.

J. Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

a brief note about the end of the year

So, the end is nigh. This is my last week of official work, then from the 22nd to the 4th of January I'll be away from my regular duties, worried only about Christmas preparations, and then off to the remote cottage we've rent in the middle of nowhere in North Scotland. I'm already anticipating the many reflections and wonders that will certainly happen, as for the first time in years I have managed to accomplish, if not all, most of what I've decided to do this year. The strange thing is, although 2008 was the "No-plan Year", it gradually became the "Decision Year", as month after month I had to make decisions to climb steps, but only when they appeared at my feet. I loved living like this, wanting more from life, but waiting for it (her?) to point the directions. I can probably count the days on one hand when I wasn't happy to wake up and go about my day, doing what was expected of me. Of course, my errands and general routine were probably not ideal, nor were they amazingly satisfying, but the consciousness that they were results of my choices certainly made everything else easy.

I'm starting to find that happiness is partly created by being approved of by surrounding peers and loved ones, but on the other hand, if you're convinced that your acts and choices are the right ones, the idea rubs off on people, and approval becomes not a possibility, but a certainty.

--

And 2008 was definitely a good year for books (and almost no gigs or clubs). There was the beautiful Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, then Donna Tartt breathtaking college novel The Secret History. There was the sweet and heartbreaking Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, the memorable and relevant To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and the surprisingly enlightening A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. And now, having just finished the masterly written and romantic Austen novel Persuasion, I felt I'm finishing my year in style.

I've read many others that I can quite remember just now, but most of them were books that I grived after turning the last page - a sensation only replaced by the thrill of reading the first page of another great novel.

It feels great to know that I'll have to choose the next ones to take with on my holiday away from civilization.

A Novel's Help

These days, it is not very often that I come across a book that simply sweeps me off my feet, that makes me want to read it slowly and carefully, underling sentences and writing comments on the margins. Recently, I really enjoyed the The Glass Castle, a memoir which I bought at the airport in São Paulo and read the whole thing in Portuguese on the plane to London, from the American journalist Jeannette Walls (in this YouTube clip her idiosyncratic and often irritatingly free-spirited mother appears, while she happily summarises her story to the camera like an E! presenter. I found that annoying.)

But for the past 2 weeks I've been completely engrossed in Siri Hustvedt's novel What I Loved. It is beautifully written in a sort of careful, elaborate narrative that forces you to decelarate and enjoy the language and the comprehensive pondering of the characters' emotional behaviours. Until I finished the novel today and started combing the internet for people's impressions and opinions, I was also amazed at Hustvedt's imaginary capacity to create such a complex plot (the book explores 25 years of two New York 'art' couples), but then I found a couple of articles that mentioned the similarity of several sections of the book to Hustvedt and her husband Paul Auster's lives, and then my awe faded a little. Apparently, both authors are well-known in the literary world for "dressing" facts from their own lives, as a journalist wrote, and incorporate them into their work.

That said, knowing this doesn't affect my infatuation with this book. In this little audio clip, she says that if you look at people sitting around the table of a dinner party, you could bet that every single one has stories about love and loss, and how both have been largely influential on how those people turned out. She says "I'm interested in why people become what they become. When my daughter was 3, I was giving her a bath, and she asked me: 'Mom, when I grow up, will I still be Sophie?' That was a very dramatic question about human life, and this novel is about those ideas, the role of culture in shaping people's character."

I just loved that. In my own troubled relationship with my family and friends, I've often tried to put breaks on my own judgement of them and simply tried to understand what was behind their acts and behaviour. It made things easier, at least for me, and opened space for forgiveness. Reading this novel and hearing that comment clarified a lot what I have - often unconsciously - tried to do, and shone a light into a practice that needs to be exercised by anyone who wants to be some kind of writer/artist.

I'm looking forward to read her other novels.