The Brothel in Rosenstrasse is a sweet-bitter story of the Continental fin de siecle. It is ever-so-loosely linked to author Moorcock's Eternal Champion hyperwork through the von Bek family, but it has no fantastic or "speculative" elements, and it reads with the pace of an introspective literary novel, not a pulp action novella. There is a good deal of explicit sex and moral puzzlement, with a bit of political intrigue and some existential digust and despair.

The setting is Mirenburg, capital of the principality of Waldenstein at the close of the 19th century, and the story is structured as a memoir being written by the dilletante black-sheep younger-son aristocratic protagonist. Occasionally--and invariably mid-paragraph with no overt signals of the change of register--Rickhardt von Bek interjects his present circumstances of decrepitude and impending death. Thus he juxtaposes his much later physical mortality with the demise of his youthful dreams acted out in the Mirenburg reminiscences.

The novel has some admirable metaficitonal positioning, with references to Huysmans and Salammbo, among others. Von Bek is supposed to have been the successful author of a prior memoir The 100 Day Siege: A Personal Record of the Last Months of Mirenburg, but that was superficial journalism for the reading public, while his real personal concerns are only written out in this deathbed manuscript. The whole thing is divided into three very long chapters, with the rambling narrative voice providing few natural stopping-places within them. I enjoyed it a great deal, and I recommend it to seekers of literary decadence.