Glitzerregen/Geschlechtsteilchen

In 1976 Anais Nin wrote about her 1940s erotica: -->

At the time we were all writing erotica at a dollar a page, I realized that for centuries we had had only one model for this literary genre—the writing of men. I was already conscious of a difference between the masculine and feminine treatment of sexual experience. I knew that there was a great disparity between Henry Miller's explicitness and my ambiguities—between his humorous, Rabelaisian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships in the unpublished portions of the diary. As I wrote in Volume Three of the Diary, I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate.

Women, I thought, were more apt to fuse sex with emotion, with love, and to single out one man rather than be promiscuous. This became apparent to me as I wrote the novels and the Diary, and I saw it even more clearly when I began to teach. But although women's attitude towards sex was quite distinct from that of men, we had not yet learned how to write about it.

Here in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure from a client who wanted me to "leave out the poetry." I believed that my style was derived from a reading of men's works. For this reason I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. I put the erotica aside. Rereading it these many years later, I see that my own voice was not completely suppressed. In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman's language, seeing sexual experience from a woman's point of view. I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men.

If the unexpurgated version of the Diary is ever published, this feminine point of view will be established more clearly. It will show that women (and I, in the Diary) have never separated sex from feeling, from love of the whole man.

I would argue against the existence of a "woman's language" in the strict sense - after all, each writer uses the same basic linguistic toolkit, regardless of their gender. However, I agree that women have a different perspective on sex, albeit a shifted one from that of the 1940s in particular and even 1976. As I mentioned in a previous review of Anna Blumbach's Kurze Nächte, women writing literary fiction in German tend to close the bedroom door, aside from describing traumatic sexual experiences. I still don't know why that is, in a culture that has dealt with sexuality very openly for two or three generations.

Yet not unlike Anais Nin, Germany's women writers can now make a buck or two on the side with erotica published in a couple of imprints, notably Heyne Hardcore and Anais. Not long ago, I met the former series editor at Anais - you can read a piece about her and the imprint here - and she told me she'd written her master's thesis on women and masturbation and was really pleased to be able to publish erotica written specially by women, for women. Which I think isn't new as such (remember those teenage under-the-covers sessions with Virginia Andrews and Jilly Cooper? Or was that just me?) - just that Anais's books aim to be more realistic and the marketing is more explicit. As I put it in the previous review, they're literary jazz-mags for girls, and proud of it.

So my friend Anna Blumbach gave me her latest, Glitzerregen, and another friend also recommended Lulu Bachmann's Geschlechtsteilchen. Prompting an enjoyable road-test comparison of style and technique in women's erotica, certain aspects of which I shall sum up for you here. You're welcome.

Glitzerregen follows on from Anna's previous novel, again narrated by semi-single mother Eva. She starts pretty much as she left off in Kurze Nächte, clubbing, battling the job centre, enjoying sex with sundry attractive partners. That section of the book was a little frustrating at times - cut to the quick, Eva! I wanted to tell her, especially because we got only one sex scene and that was totally censored. Confused? Oh yes, I was. But luckily things take a turn for the better for Eva and her libidinous readers when she starts a project to build an ecologically autark house - and her long-term occasional lover Tom pops up while her son's away.

Cue ravishing amounts of amazing sex in countless locations, accompanied by soul-searching over whether relationships are a good thing for her. Anna Blumbach writes extremely well about sex. Her descriptions are precise and arousing and realistic and entertaining, and it's easy to visualise exactly what's going on. I think that's a very good thing in erotica. All embedded in a modern Berlin story with authentic backdrops and emotions, a political message, a feminist standpoint and even a soundtrack if you like that kind of thing. Read both the books for double the fun. Interestingly, Anna Blumbach shows how far we've come since Anais Nin's days by making her Eva a firm proponent of promiscuity.

And so to Lulu Bachmann's Geschlechtsteilchen. It's a collection of short stories, some slightly skirting the issue at hand, others full-on erotica. What most of them have in common is that they're slightly silly. A Cinderella not censored by the Brothers Grimm. A special birthday present of serial sex in bathtubs filled with – wait and see. A super-macho dog-trainer who enjoys – well, read that one yourself. Most of them passed the practice test; all of them were well-written and entertaining. At times I had the bizarre sensation of laughing out loud while reading porn. But I certainly enjoyed that because I do find sex very comical at times.

Lulu Bachmann's book, I kept thinking, is not unlike if Caitlin Moran had written girl-porn. Assertive female characters having a lot of fun but also plenty of arguments with their partners, honest and punctuated by excellent punchlines. In comparison to Blumbach, her descriptions aren't as explicit but the book offers the compensation of bizarre plots and outright comedy. Bachmann explodes Nin's suggestion that Henry Miller's humorous approach was due to his gender. And while she employs what Nin describes as "ambiguities" and ascribes as a female trait, Blumbach and a host of other women writers have proved that explicitness is by no means limited to men's writing.

I haven't read Shades of Grey because I'm a literary snob, but I'm told it's not very good for two reasons: the writing and the gender relations. If you read German, here are two options that have those two posts covered. In other words, neither of them leave out their own particular brand of poetry. What I'd like now is for women writing literary fiction in German to be equally open about sexuality under their own names as under pseudonyms. I know I find a little erotica within a literary novel a delightful thing, and I'd love to read that from a woman's perspective. A challenge, I realise.

A Titular Conundrum

So the news is Mr. Tim Mohr has finished his translation of the follow-up to Charlotte Roche's Wetlands and the English version will be out in spring of 2013. Hooray - a braver man than me. But this time the title's much trickier. Schoßgebete is a play on words (like Feuchtgebiete meaning, umm, moist areas and wetlands), and also echoes the previous title. The literal translation is something like lap or maybe crotch prayers but it's a pun on the word Stoßgebet, which – I kid you not – means a short prayer sent up to heaven, also referred to as an ejaculation.

Any bright ideas? You can read my disappointed, damning review here for inspiration. My best idea so far is Fifty Shades of Brown. Ha! Add your suggestions in the comments section.

Charlotte Roche: Schoßgebete

There was so much hype I felt I couldn't not read it. The broadsheets devoted huge amounts of space to the follow-up to the massive-selling Feuchtgebiete even before it came out, there were huge piles of books in all the shops, it has a huge headstart in the book charts, and a huge row seems to be brewing now that Germany's favourite feminist Alice Schwarzer has replied in kind to her treatment in the book. So, Schoßgebete had to be read.

This time around, Charlotte Roche has advertised the book as a "real emotional rollercoaster", advising us to fasten our seatbelts. It's much closer to her own life as a mother in her mid-thirties than Feuchtgebiete, she's told us, and deals with her own real trauma of losing three brothers in a car accident the day before her wedding. Plus with her feelings about maintaining a loving relationship, mainly through fulfilling all her partner's wishes on the sex front. It feels uncomfortably close to Roche's real life, as far as I can judge. Which makes it hard to trash the book - it feels like trashing an individual. But trashed it must be.

Because where Feuchtgebiete was provocative and genuinely shocking, likeable and funny and created a great anti-heroine, Schoßgebete is none of that. It deals with three days in the life of Elizabeth Kiehl, an English woman living in Germany and trying to be the perfect mother and lover. So nothing all that new there then. There are a few parallels to Feuchtgebiete, especially the scatalogical elements - here we're treated to a nice description of mother and daughter's worms infestation, some details on Elizabeth's nervous stomach and an unpleasant anal sex accident.

My main problem as a reader was that the narrator is perhaps one of the most irritating characters I've ever come across, and I suspect that's not deliberate. Roche puts us through the agonies of what reads like several verbatim therapy sessions clumsily condensed into one, in which Elizabeth spouts various theories and ideas about abandoning her parents, having to visit brothels with her husband to keep him happy and thereby maintain their relationship for eternity, what her awful mother did to harm her with her changing partners, and all her fears and phobias. Meanwhile her beloved therapist - who she calls Agnetha in a rare burst of Rochian humour - nods patiently and approves of everything she does.

In between we get a lot of preaching and proselytising about how we ought to be bringing up our children, running our households and generally leading our lives. Being human, of course, Elizabeth is a terrible hypocrite, using organic washing powder but going everywhere by car, repeating the mistakes she criticises in others, and so on. That doesn't make it easier to accept her prescriptions - we should all be in therapy or at least read parenting books (in my eyes one of the most foolish things parents can ever do), we should never dye our hair, we should never buy the BILD, we should go vegetarian, we should try and make our relationships last for ever.

Much of the book seems to be about Charlotte Roche killing her darlings, and I wouldn't like to be her mother or her ex-best friend and have to read this. Which is what Alice Schwarzer seems to be reacting to - one of her ex-darlings being feminism itself. An all-new recipe: sex will set us free, she seems to be telling us, and relying on a strong older man with plenty of money. But as various commentators have pointed out, sex-positive feminism is hardly a new phenomenon, and as Schwarzer's pointed out, our grandmothers too relied on strong older men with money. Only they had little choice in economic terms. Roche's recipe comes across as merely reactionary, in both the literal and figurative sense.

Three things make the book just about readable: the sex scenes, the open descriptions of life in a patchwork family, and the strand that deals with the car crash and its aftermath. Not strictly erotic for the most part, Roche's sex scenes are, however, terribly useful in the vein of a Cosmopolitan How To Pleasure Your Man feature. And of course they will shift units, what with taking up the first few pages in the book for potential buyers to blush at in bookshops. I found the descriptions of dealing with sharing a child with its father accurate - the strange contrast between absolute discipline when she's at home and a complete lack of structure when she's not, the sudden boredom, etc.

And then there's the car crash. This was the compelling thing about the novel, the raw emotions it reveals, the light it sheds on the functioning or non-functioning of a family, and Roche/Kiehl's anger at the tabloid press for exploiting her misery to sell newspapers. But while the narrator rightly rails at journalists for putting her suffering on the front page, I felt very uncomfortable about reading her own story of the events. It raised a moral dilemma I'm not sure she's aware of - because as readers, we too are voyeuristically wallowing in her pain in the same way as people watching a gossip piece on TV, where her severely injured and confused mother was tricked into giving an interview after the accident. Perhaps it's less objectionable for someone to make money out of their own account, but what with the less than flattering portrayal of the estranged mother, I can't help thinking the book may upset a number of people in a rather similar way.

At any rate, the car crash strand broke off at an unsatisfactory point, with the mother still under strong drugs and not yet realising her three sons had been killed. Possibly it was an attempt to uphold some dignity for the mother, although with this self-centred narrator it might just have been because that extremely emotional moment of realisation - which I'd have found fascinating - was not of so much interest for Elizabeth Kiehl as her enjoyment of the limelight as sympathy-recipient number one. And although I hadn't been expecting a literary masterpiece, the novel also peters out harmlessly over 70s porn where it could have gone out with a bang.

So, a daring emotional striptease that falls absolutely flat. If you really want to read MILF eroticism from a feminist perspective, go for Anna Blumberg's excellent Kurze Nächte (see my review).

I do realise, by the way, that this is more of an emotional response than a good review. But it's that kind of book, and I found reading it genuinely infuriating. To add a very minor literary criticism that explains why I read it all the way to the end - I had hoped the heroine might develop as a character. She didn't.

Schoßgebete - Gearing Up to the New Charlotte Roche

The follow-up to Charlotte Roche's gazillion-selling Feuchtgebiete/Wetlands is on its way, and it's called Schoßgebete. Apparently it's about that "last great taboo: marital sex". I'm looking forward to it, although I'm not entirely sure marital sex is really a taboo subject. But whatever, no doubt Charlotte Roche will give it the bestselling funny treatment one would expect.

I'm fascinated by the dodgy pun of the title. It's a play on the words "Schoß" - lap, womb, even bosom in certain contexts - and "Stoßgebet" - a short, sudden prayer known in English as an ejaculation. I kid you not.

Anyway, die Zeit's literary lady Ursula März writes about all the marketing kerfuffle going on right now, with an initial print-run of half a million copies and a book trailer and a multitude of internet promotions and 200-packs of books for retailers. She also interviewed Roche's publisher Marcel Hartges a while back, which makes very entertaining reading. Lots of passive-aggressive dispute about what makes proper literature and whether it's a bad thing that people who don't normally read books read Charlotte Roche. The most bizarre bit is when Hartges compares Roche with Thomas Bernhard.

So roll on 15 August, is all I can say.

Anna Blumbach: Kurze Nächte

The Anais imprint does literary jazz mags for girls. I looked at the Amazon reviews for Anna Blumbach’s Kurze Nächte and realised that nobody wants to admit that. They all talk about the character development and the language – which is very much a factor, and I’ll come to it, don’t get me wrong – but what they don’t say is: “This book turned me on.” So to get it over with, yes, this is an effective piece of erotica. It does what it says on the tin.

I was given the book by the author (Anna Blumbach is a pseudonym) because I’d been talking about translating sex scenes. It makes me feel awkward, and I’ve written about it before I think, because in order to translate sex you do have to visualise what’s going on very precisely. If it’s not well written that’s difficult, and if it is it’s titillating and distracts you from translating. I work in a large open office space, and always have to translate sex scenes at home. The sex scenes in Kurze Nächte – and there are many – mean you probably shouldn’t read it in public. I even felt slightly exposed reading it on my balcony. I wouldn't want to translate it.

What worried me to begin with was that the narrator Eva is in exactly the same position as me: what’s called a “semi-single parent” in her late 30s in Berlin. Reading about her life in between her sexual exploits was disturbing because I recognised so many of her emotions. The maternal guilt, the comfort and love a child can give, the frustration, missing your child when it’s not there and resenting it when it is. The fear of aging, the body-related insecurities, all that stuff about having had a child and what it does to you. And that made it hard not to identify with Eva to an extent I didn’t want to go to. On the other hand, it felt so true that the rest of the book seemed searingly honest too. I don’t know whether it is or not.

Plot? Yes, it has a plot, to go along with that cliché about women and porn. But it’s the kind of rambling Berlin-novel plot about bohemians and creative types getting drunk that I don’t particularly enjoy, as a rule. Only with more sex scenes to make up for it. Eva loves Wolf (poet) but he doesn’t love her back, or not properly, not the way she wants him to. So she leaves him but she’s heartbroken. She starts a thing with Tom (DJ), becoming a sort of permanent bit on the side. And then there’s Kolja (Russian artist), an infatuation and one-night-stand who keeps popping up again and rubbing her up the wrong way. In between, Eva struggles with the benefits office and philosophises about how crap life is when you’re expected to combine full-time work with bringing up a child but refuse to do so.

As the Amazon reviewers point out in their own sweet way, Kurze Nächte is a Bildungsroman of sorts. Eva starts off insecure and unhappy but by finding a passion of her own (a miniature architectural project), she grows more confident and finds it easier to deal with the men in her life too. It’s work, then, which ultimately sets her free, to put it cynically. Anna Blumbach seems to have tried to add a political dimension to the lit-jazz-mag format. The message appears to be that a self-determined work life makes for a fulfilling life all round, including sexually. But her narrator Eva veers between describing her own inadequacies and raging against the system – a credible enough character trait – which dilutes that message somewhat. And I’m not sure it doesn’t get lost entirely along the way.

It’s certainly literary enough. I loved the language. I loved the occasional Berlinerisms and sillinesses, interrupting what’s otherwise a plain enough style common to a lot of contemporary German writing. I loved the sex scenes, the feelings of inadequacy gradually making way for more relaxed encounters. I loved the laugh-out-loud “What the…?” moments when the narrator gets up to even more nonsense than usual. It’s very much a novel of now – Eva is not a put-upon ex-housewife or a young girl just discovering her sexuality, she knows very well what she’s doing. I loved the way Blumbach often uses the phrase “as best I can” in the saucier moments, summing up her Eva very nicely.

It made me think about how men and women write about sex in German literary fiction, actually. Maybe it’s just my choice of reading matter, but I’ve a feeling that women writers tend not to bother, or if they do venture an attempt it’s almost always about bad sex, traumatic experiences. In fact I’m struggling to come up with a single example of genuinely erotic writing by women in the genre. A while back I bought a women’s magazine solely because it claimed to feature erotica by biggish names, including Sibylle Berg and Alina Bronsky. It was a big disappointment. Whereas men seem happy to include explicit descriptions of good and bad sex and average sex and frustrating sex and just plain sex sex in their literary novels. Ralf Rothmann, Peter Stamm, Rainer Merkel, Thomas Pletzinger, Selim Özdogan, Finn-Ole Heinrich, Michael Lentz, Jan Böttcher, Helmut Krausser – they all get taken seriously nonetheless.

So are women writers shy about it? Would we… would we still really think they were sluts? Is that why the few exceptions cause such a fuss? Think Charlotte Roche of course, but also Helene Hegemann, although you could argue that in both cases the sex they describe has a traumatic edge to it. Anna Blumbach takes what seems like a more open and honest approach. Although the last sex bit (actually incredibly well done) would fit well into the traumatic category, her protagonist usually enjoys sex, but looks too at what she wants from it, often confirmation and comfort and – oh yes – love.

If there’s one thing I always find fascinating and infinitely puzzling, it’s how on earth other people in a similar situation to me lead their lives. You know the way everyone else seems to be having much, much more fun, no matter how much fun you yourself may or may not be having? I took this fictional example with a pinch of salt, but it was a genuine pleasure to read. And it does for Kaffee Burger what Axolotl Roadkill does for Berghain.

Dangerous Translations

Quick! If you're in London you can still book for an event about translating smutty stuff at the South Bank Centre on Wednesday night. Featuring Shaun Whiteside and Polly McLean. Oh, and I see it's a live translation slam. I really want to see how a live translation slam works some day.

Misleading Headline of the Month

Captain Bluebear - I'm a porno freak! the billboard shrieked at me as I fetched our morning rolls from the baker's shop on Sunday.

You mean you don't know Captain Bluebear? Walter Moers' classic blue sea-bear is a teller of tall tales, available in English translation by John Brownjohn. But most of his stories involve pirates and islands and mermaids and the like, not necessarily pornography as far as I'm aware.

It was all a ruse though, sorry. West Berlin's favourite tabloid, BZ, ran an interview with the actor Wolfgang Völz to celebrate his upcoming 80th birthday. Völz is the voice of Captain Bluebear in the long-running puppet/cartoon version, always a joy on a lazy weekend morning. And he shared his life's wisdoms, including this little bon-mot:

I'm a big porno freak, for example. I like reading well-written porn books. The whole series… that red and green series… what's it called again... Oh, it's my age… I'm starting to forget things. Well anyway, there's some really good stuff, really great books. You don't have to read that stuff by that girl, what's her name, who's always fiddling with her bum and doesn't shave.

The latter being, of course, a reference to Charlotte Roche's Wetlands (and her armpits). I'm sure one of my readers will fill us in on that red and green series - I find it hard to imagine it might be Männerschwarm Verlag's "rote Reihe" of gay erotic literature. Then there's the Anais series, but they look more flesh-coloured than red or green. Not my specialist subject, I'm afraid.

Katja Oskamp: Hellersdorfer Perle

This is a book with a picture of a corset on the front. And on the back as well, for that matter. The art department was obviously going for a clear statement. Yes indeed, vicar – there’s sex in it!

In fact though, Katja Oskamp has written a modern-day Cinderella for bored middle-class mothers. And I read it a rate of knots, because I only very narrowly escape the target group. Oh OK, I’m slap-bang in the middle of the target group, I admit it.

So here’s the deal: the narrator, who we can only surmise is called Katja, is a bored middle-class mother. Her partner Micha is a theatre critic and they have a pre-school daughter, who is of course perfect in every way. And life would be wonderful, a veritable ball of middle-class pleasures – a pasta machine, children’s parties, holidays by the sea – if only it weren’t so utterly dull and passionless. Oh, can you relate to this yet, fellow middle-class mothers?

So the narrator stumbles into a bar at the edge of East Berlin on a rainy night, the Hellersdorfer Perle of the title. And it’s an absolute freakshow, run by an ex-prostitute and peopled by a silent old bid, three men with no legs – and The Man. Like in all the best fairytales, The Man – we never learn his name either – sets a series of challenges. He tells her to wear a skirt next time and disappears. Next time she wears a skirt and he tells her to wear a corset, after that she wears a corset and he tells her to walk all the way home, and the time after that – well, that’s where the corset comes in. And the handcuffs. And the fluffy blue dressing gown.

There’s an interval, when she returns to the family and pretends to herself that she’s happy, until one day she goes to see a play with her partner – only to face an actress dressed up in a corset on stage, acting out her own night of kinky passion. Oh my. The Man, it transpires, is a playwright, and not a truck-driver with working-man’s hands from the wrong side of town after all.

How does it play out? They get back together again and she leads a double life, devoted mother and proofreader by day and S&M lover by night, or at least some nights. She introduces him to her daughter, and eventually there’s a cheesy half-page happy ending where she returns to her roots in a high-rise tower block in East Berlin. So now I’ve told you the plot, such as it is. But there’s so much more to Hellersdorfer Perle than that.

For a start, it’s wickedly funny, in a way that creeps up on you from behind. That corset is a huge source of comedy, as it’s a gargantuan task to put it on, and taking it off is even worse. The scene in which the narrator’s best friend catches her in the middle of the night, enlisting her partner to take it off – with a wrench in his hand – is straight out of Little Britain. I mean that in a good way.

And the comedy’s the cruel kind too that makes you squirm. The best friend, Tina, is a soap opera actress who has to be the centre of attention and talks in platitudes – often straight out of her scripts. While her partner Peter and their son spend their week nights watching mummy on TV with maxi-packs of potato crisps and tinned sardines. There’s a beautifully done parallel scene to the whole corset-removal episode, when Peter turns up to get the narrator’s help in donning a Santa Claus costume, tubby tummy and all.

And then there’s the clever casting and locations. Because it’s Ingeborg, the rake-thin prostitute-turned-landlady, who’s the fairy godmother, first helping the narrator into her uncomfortable outfit and then going shopping with her for more titillating gladrags. And Cinderella goes to the ball at Ingeborg’s down-at-heel dive, dancing to Je t’aime on the jukebox. And of course there’s Hellersdorf itself, a land of high-rise concrete that suddenly gives way to a rural idyll complete with squirrels and ponies.

And what a Prince Charming! An older man with thick eyebrows and hearing aids, a man who knows what he wants and has a past to talk about. After Cinderella runs off at the stroke of midnight he duly tracks her down, sending roses and staring across an empty playground. Which is utterly creepy. But like the setting, the rough prince proves to be not quite what the narrator – or the reader – expected. What he isn’t, though, is average.

Oskamp’s not the first writer to take a heroine out of the frustration of middle-class motherhood and plunge her into sexual adventures. I remember reading Judy Blume’s Wifey at a far too impressionable age, and am appalled in retrospect at her conciliatory ending. And there’s Lady Chatterley too, to stretch the point slightly. But Hellersdorfer Perle is so bitingly cynical and at the same time so laugh-out-loud funny that it does stand out. Oskamp plays skillfully with our expectations of the bonkbuster, refusing to conform to stereotype. Yes, her ending is annoyingly conciliatory too, but in a different way to Judy Blume’s 1970s classic – nowadays Wifey can actually leave her partner without the sky falling in.

One thing I find particularly comical is the critics’ reactions. The men don’t like it and the women do, to oversimplify. Which might have something to do with the fact that the lily-livered middle-class father constantly clutching a bottle of beer in front of the TV is of course – a critic. Or maybe you have to have been there to get it. You know, the guilt, the “Why aren’t I happy?” the lying to yourself, and the triumph and liberation when you stomp all over the middle-class dream. I totally get it. Now if Oskamp’s next novel looks at that uncomfortable bump when you land on cold, hard ground – and makes me laugh too – she’ll be in my good books forever.

Booksellers Reveal All

They're taking off their glasses, shaking down their hair and closing up shop for the rest of the afternoon. Remember that fantastic scene with the lady in the bookstore from The Big Sleep? Well soon you can get your kicks from German lady booksellers in an erotic calendar.

As trade mag Börsenblatt reports, twelve lovely ladies from all around the country have been posing for the calendar. Cue much moaning about people expecting booksellers to be mousy and bespectacled when they're actually full-blooded babes. I don't know though, I think I'd find it rather unnerving to be sold books by someone I'd seen in her underwear. I suspect it'll be no good for business - and if you watch that clip above, you'll notice that all those feminine charms still don't convince Humphrey Bogart to buy anything.

Dirty Words, Picture Dictionaries and Wetlands

Jessa Crispin and I discuss the above at Bookslut. The picture dictionary, just in case it gets you wondering, is the Duden-Oxford Bildwörterbuch (Mannheim, 1994) and is a very useful tool for translators with some fascinating illustrations of car engines, church architecture and the human body, all painstakingly labelled in two languages.

If you own a copy, I recommend a look at pp. 552-553 for the most hilarious drawings of a nightclub you'll ever see. My, how we laughed.

At Last, Something German Writers Excel at on the International Stage: Masturbation

A couple of days ago, Chris Cox in the Guardian books blog flagged up Charlotte Roche's celebrated German novel Wetlands as the archetypal modern-day wank-shocker. And don't ask me why, but for some reason the past three literary texts I've translated over the last few weeks have all touched on the subject of self-abuse, prompting much discussion among my friends. That's discussion on how to translate certain terms, mind - not discussion of why Katy gets all the jerk-off material to deal with.

It would seem that while the French and Russians do the slushy stuff (see yesterday's post below), the Germans are busily seeing to themselves. My friend Selim Özdogan has written a number of stories on the subject - one of which you can read at Brooklyn Rail's InTranslation. Or think of Thomas Brussig's Heroes Like Us (check out the bizarre "keywords" behind that Amazon link). Why not take a look at a translated excerpt from Rainer Merkel's Lichtjahre entfernt for some seriously bored pornography consumption that caused me the odd headache translating it. And I even recall a detective novel I particularly disliked and have forgotten the name of, in which the private dick's only remarkable characteristic was choking the chicken under the shower.

According to Rory MacLean in his entertaining Meet the Germans blog, Germans are officially ranked the worst lovers in the world - an unnamed survey claiming they only think of their own pleasure in bed. And they are indeed having major problems sustaining the population.

Yet as I've established in the course of my professional practice, those German writers may all be at it, but they don't have all that many words for it. In fact, in two of my three recent instances, the writers used the same word: wichsen. I translated it differently every time - incidentally discovering that English has a plethora of synonyms for male masturbation but far fewer for the female fun.

That's enough of the smut though. As of next week, love german books will be a strictly monkey-slapping free zone. Probably.

Reading in Bed

A British coffee brand is marketing its product to women by means of videos of sexy men reading out loud. Apparently you're supposed to make yourself a coffee and enjoy some classic or modern literature brought out by a certain publisher. Funnily enough, although there are actually a good few translations on offer, they're all out of French or Russian. Presumably German books are too turgid and unsexy to sell hot beverages.

Meanwhile, as a paper I wouldn't normally read reports, the coffee-makers have commissioned a survey and found out that people lie when asked what they do in bed. Seven out of ten men, we're told, regularly read to their wives and girlfriends to help them relax before going to sleep. Yeah, right.

Anyway, if you're feeling communicative, why not suggest a nice German book for reading aloud to help wives and girlfriends relax before going to sleep. My suggestion would be Ralf Rothmann's Feuer brennt nicht, which I didn't dare review here because it's so downright chock-a-block with sex.