Translated by Tim Mohr

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The novel "Feuchtgebiete," by the German television personality Charlotte Roche, was a best seller throughout Europe last year, at one time topping Amazon's international list. The book has just been released in English - first in Britain and now in America - under the title "Wetlands." (The original title could also be translated as "moist patches.") As much as sales, "Wetlands" generated controversy and debate in Europe; critics described it as "taboo- Granta compared it favorably to "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Female Eunuch," two books that may never have been grouped together before. Whether the controversy - and the sales - will follow here is, I'm afraid, the most interesting thing about the novel.

Roche, 31, was born in England and raised in Germany. This is her first book; she told one interviewer that until now she had written "only the lines for my own TV show." She considers "Wetlands" a feminist manifesto about society's oppressive standards of female beauty and hygiene, a new literature of female empowerment: "I wanted to write about the ugly parts of the human body. The smelly bits. The juices of the female body. . . . I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude towards her body - someone who has never even heard that women are supposedly smelly between their legs. A real free spirit."

To that end, "Wetlands" is narrated by 18-year-old Helen Memel, who has been suffering from an anal lesion after an intimate shaving incident. The entire book takes place on the proctology unit as she recovers from surgery. Helen entertains herself by remembering varied sex acts, obsessing over bodily fluids and playing pranks on the hospital workers.

"I'm my own garbage disposal. Bodily secretion recycler," free-spirit Helen says. "And so I come to one of my biggest hobbies. Popping zits. . . . I clench the blackhead on my upper arm between the thumb and pointer finger of my left hand and, with a squeeze, out comes the worm. It goes directly from my thumb into my mouth." Helen eats her vaginal discharge, her own vomit as well as that of a friend, and pus not only from her pimples but from her anal wound. The book opens with a discussion of anal sex and hemorrhoids, then moves on to genital shaving, brothels, enemas and the nuances of sex during menstruation. (Helen trades used tampons with a friend and discards her homemade version in the hospital elevator.) "It's like a sport," she says, after taunting a male nurse. "In any room I have to be the most uninhibited of all those present."

Yet the most unsettling part of "Wetlands" is its author's belief that she is a pio Roche seems to know nothing about the extensive literature of women's sexuality, a genre broad enough to merit its own section in most bookstores. In interviews, she sounds like a long-secluded inventor who emerges to announce she has developed the wheel. "Men have this whole range of different names for their sexual organs," she told one journalist, "while us women still don't really have a language for our lust. . . . I think a lot of women still don't masturbate, simply because they don't know how to talk about it."

Any casual few minutes on the Web uncovers a vibrant world of tampon art and anal sex advice and a brisk commerce in women's shoes. Indeed, the topics Roche clumsily broaches - the sexual power of body fluids; the links between obsession and shame, pleasure and pain - have long been central to feminist and queer sex culture. Betty Dodson wrote "Liberating Masturbation" years before Roche was born. Pat Califia's stories of transgressive sexual culture, the feminist defense of pornography in "Caught Looking," the frank and funny essays by women like Susie Bright and Carol Queen: all of this is easy enough to find.

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. (The standards of The Times severely limit quotations here.)

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