Somewhere between fantasy and reality is the unexplored world in which Hoffman's characters live. A man reading the newspaper suddenly finds himself transformed into the elder brother of god. A foreigner in Japan, falsely accused of assaulting a young girl, finds his innocence slowly slipping away from him. Why did the woman in the restaurant scream? The empty café fills; reason loses its coherence. In the novella Solitude, the last of eight tales in this volume, Solomon Rose returns home after 22 years to confront a dilemma soluble only by murder.
