Wetlands Bombs in America

No accounting for taste.  Charlotte Roche novel Feuchtgebiete about a teenage girl's obsession with her bodily secretions was a blockbuster publishing sensation in Germany, but has failed to catch fire in the US since it's release in April (Wetlands, translated by Tim Mohr).  Checking this week, the book had an Amazon sales-ranking of 11,661.

What happened?  Are American's too prudish for Roche's frank discussion of the female body?  Not at all.  The book is simply poorly written (accurately translated by Mr. Mohr) and very unsexy.  The New York Times greeted the US launch with these comments:

"Part of the controversy over “Wetlands” has been whether it is
pornography or literature. That sexually explicit writing can be
serious seems long settled. There are really no taboo topics — good
writing trumps such complaints. The problem is that “Wetlands” has all
the nuance of Mad Magazine
and less wit. Its descriptions are banal and repetitive, its vocabulary
painfully limited. Helen is meant to be a complicated character, but she is merely
inconsistent. She spreads her effluvia about like confetti but worries
that someone might see her chewing her fingernails — “that belongs
behind closed doors.” She likes to “break into the public pool and go
drunken skinny-­dipping after a night out clubbing” but is embarrassed
about being naked in the operating room. She is fascinated by anal sex,
her wound and its discharge, yet mortified if she passes gas in a
public toilet. All of this is supposed to be brave and disturbing, but
“Wetlands” is simply and willfully aggressive. Helen’s a mess, and not
a very interesting one. "

The Los Angeles Times is a bit kinder in its assessment – the reviewer attempts to find a transcendent story behind the graphic scenes: 

In drips and oozes, her real story emerges. She is the completely
neglected child of two repressed and depressed people. She doesn't know
what her father does for work. She has memories she does not trust and
a recurring vision of an event that could not have occurred. Or did it?
No one in her family communicates — even when they visit. It soon
becomes apparent that Helen is so desperately into her bodily functions
and pleasures because no one else — not a lover and definitely not her
mother or father — is actually interested in her.

Trouble is, most readers as well quickly lose interest in Helen and her stunts.  There are some cultural events that can cut across borders and languages and find audiences in Europe and the US.  The film The Lives of Others is an example, as well as Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Amazon sales rank 700), even though I am not a fan of the latter. But Wetlands is not such a phenomenon.  I find it amusing that Amazon informs me that "buyers of Wetlands also purchased The Kindly Ones (by Jonathan Littell)" which was a publishing sensation in France but bombed in the US.

If you don't want to read Wetlands – and I don't recommend it – you can watch ihis rather good interview wifh Charlotte Roche in English (appropriate words bleeped out).