This book tells the story of an unusual seduction. A man in his study receives a call from a woman he has never seen. She’s nothing but a voice to him, beginning to speak shyly and quietly, as soft as the snow the man sees falling outside his window. At first he’s merely curious, but gradually he is drawn into an almost hypnotic spell. The seduction turns into a struggle in which each wants to turn the other into his or her object – and a struggle in which two worlds confront each other: the man’s bourgeois existence and the woman’s hidden life, which represents the complete Other – both dream and danger, utopia and obsession. The story of this encounter, which escalates into a radical showdown, is above all a book about the power of imagination, in which the old myth of the siren’s irresistible song appears as a living psychological truth. Dieter Wellershoff called the book a novella, not just because it is about an “unheard-of incident” (thus corresponding to a classical definition of the term) but also because of the hermetic nature of its plot, which is a single, unstoppable process: an adventure at once of experience and analysis.
