Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tastefully sexy, deeply serious, 20 Dec 2003
Set at the turn of the 19th/20th century in a middle European principality's capital, Mirenberg, the main action of this novel takes place in a high class brothel. Here all the materialism and greed which lead up to the first world war is displayed in the tale of the roue Count von Bek and his obsession with a teenage girl whom he eventually takes to the brothel in Rosenstrasse, overseen by a clever old procuress and madame, to enjoy every possible erotic fantasy with the aid of the ladies who live there. Meanwhile, outside, a war is brewing and ultimately von Bek, his paramour and other customers and denizens of the brothel are all stuck inside together as the battles come closer and closer. This is a highly original and beautifully written novel in the best European moral tradition, with echoes of Thomas Mann and even Proust. Moorcock is a seriously undervalued writer by the reading public, though critics such as Peter Ackroyd, Angus Wilson, Angela Carter and Iain Sinclair have all praised him, and this is one of his finest, and shortest, works. It would be a fine introduction to anyone who wanted to read his non-fantasy fiction.
|
|
|
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful prose, clever idea, 15 May 2003
By A Customer
Set at the turn of the last century in a small independent province dominated by the Austro-Hungarian and Prussian empires,
this book reminded me somewhat of German writers of the period
and perhaps it has something in common with the likes of Heinrich Mann and Joseph Roth in its precise attention to detail, its cast of representative characters, its interest in what you might call Freudian sexuality. Old Count von Bek, exiled to Italy, remembers his finest hour (as he sees it) when he began an affair with the young daughter of friends. Their
erotic obsessions take them to Frau Schmetterling's (Madam
Butterfly's) fashionable and elegant brothel in Rosenstrasse,
Mirenberg where they enjoy a vast menu of perverse sexual pleasures. Moorcock draws parallels between the life of the brothel and the decadent life of upper class Middle Europe which lets us slip
inexorably towards disaster. A short, brilliantly written book which displays all Moorcock's virtues (apart from his skill as
an adventure writer). If you don't want to read his fantasy books or even his fine London novels, this is a book almost any reader of good fiction will enjoy.
|
|
|
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Precise, beautiful prose, 29 Dec 2002
In the face of some of Moorcock's more fast and furious fantasy adventure stories, one's inclined to think of him as a talented writer who can sometimes be a bit careless. This book reminds us that he can be a superbly controlled intellectual writer of character and social ideas. The book is divided into three sections. First we are introduced to the erotic world of the central characters, both of them supremely selfish in their own way. Second we learn of the society in which they exist -- that of pre-1914 upper class Europe. Third, we see the self-deception and search for pleasure collapsing into war, betrayal and decadence. Yet the poignancy and irony of the story is never lost. Moorcock is almost always a laconic, economical writer, using a variety of styles to tell a wide variety of stories, but this remains in my view one of his very best. A polished gem of precise, beautiful prose. I hardly ever read fantasy since I was a student, but Moorcock is the only writer who goes on appealing to my more sophisticated, mature self! He is, in my view, a seriously under-appreciated modern novelist and this book has never had the readership it deserves.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Michael Moorcock
by Michael Moorcock
