Thank you Thea

This is the last thing I will say about Charlotte Roche's drippy drivel. Granted, I haven't read the book, and am aware that it is a trifle dishonest to discount someone's work without even having considered it, but after all the media hype surrounding the publication of Wetlands I know enough already to embrace my dishonesty unflinchingly and proudly.

I know what Roche's protagonist does with her labia in public toilets, what loving nick-name she uses for her piles and why she hoards avocado stones like a latter-day Scrooge (great dissertation topic here: The Avocado Stone Writes Back: A Postcapitalist, Postmarxist, Postcolonial, Post-anything Study of Charlotte Roche's Subversive Anality").

I don't need to know more to have an opinion.

Above all, I simply refuse to fund this thinly veiled publicity stunt with my hard-earned money. Why is the whole world going "ooh-aah, rebellion" about this silly little book? Don't you people get it? Don't you get it that this is one big hoax in which you are instrumentalised as cash cows?

The question is: who's the boring bourgeois prude now? I can already hear some people out there tut-tutting at my un-fun un-subversiveness. Well, intercourse subversion! I'm past the age of having to prove how cool I am. And I have better things to do with my spare time.

Thea Dorn at Die Zeit has an answer to the above question that pretty much voices my own impressions (formed on the basis of the above-mentioned enforced hearsay): Roche's whole taboo-breaking spiel is a mere facade behind which slumbers her truly bourgeois primness and propriety. Her pseudo-rebellion (for that's what it is) is bound to founder, as the taboos that she sets out to break are second-rate taboos in the first place. Harmless, as it were.

Wetlands is about as radical as bloody Sex in the City.

The best article I have read on this matter so far.