The main character of "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" is Professor Gustave Gottesman, whose last name translates as "God's man." Given the company he keeps for most of his life, a rhinoceros who can talk comfortably for hours about both famous and obscure philosophers, and given an ending in which the rhinoceros carries Gottesman off to a wonderful place, the last name "God's man" suggests that Gottesman has been chosen by the divine, touched by the supernatural, and at the end is perhaps carried off to heaven. At least, the rhinoceros tells him, its stairs will be wider, even if the baths are not as reliably heated as in Gottesman's old home.

It is extraordinary how Beagle creates an engrossing tale about an intellectual who has no outwardly unusual qualities: "He was tall and rather thin, with a round, undistinguished face, a snub...