Wrecked
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A “hauntingly disarming” novel of a troubled woman obsessed with being the perfect wife and lover by the international bestselling author of Wetlands (Bust).
Charlotte Roche’s scandalous first novel, Wetlands, was an international phenomenon—a sexually and hygienically explicit tale of a young woman’s life that sold over two million copies. Her second novel, Wrecked, is just as raw and powerful as it deals not only with sex, but also with death, fidelity, feminism, and the question of what is expected from a twenty-first-century wife and mother.
“It’s easier to give a blow job than to make coffee.” That’s what Elizabeth Kiehl thinks to herself after a lengthy and inventive bout of sex with her husband Georg. Elizabeth goes to great efforts to pleasure her husband and to be a good mother to their seven-year-old daughter. But her domestic perfectionism hides a tragic rift in her psyche—the result of a terrible accident she keeps locked away in her past. As a result, Elizabeth’s relationship with Georg is rather unusual: most married couples wouldn’t frequent the local brothel for threesomes while their daughter is at school.
“Wrecked is likely to become a cult classic, American Psycho by way of Catherine Millet, as Roche places domestic sex at the forefront of contemporary erotic culture.” —Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Controversial German author Roche (Wetlands) delivers a complicated take on literary erotica where sex is more than titilation. Over three days the neurotic Elizabeth Kiehl mentally and physically prepares to visit a brothel with her husband Georg. Her crippling obsessions going to therapy, pleasing her husband sexually, being the perfect mother to her daughter Liza, and saving the environment all stem from a car accident that killed her three brothers, who were en route to her wedding, and her hatred of the paparazzi who terrorized her family afterwards. It is hard to differentiate between Roche's potentially groundbreaking expansion of female subjectivity in fiction and what is merely included to see how much she can get away with, but it is precisely the blurring of this line which makes her work so fascinating. Although trying shock, bemuse, and perhaps even enrage, Roche also attempts to explore the multitude of contradictory pressures middle class women face in the early 21st century, seen through the sharply focused, yet irredeemably skewed, lens of a mentally ill, and therefore unreliable, narrator. Although the content may trouble many readers, Roche's particularly explicit brand of Molly Bloom-esque, serpentine inner monologue is worth a read for those who can stomach it.
