Explore the Absurdity and Tragedy of Life in Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

Ransen Owen: I'd read this when I was a teenager 40 years ago and remembered that I'd liked it. I liked it this time again. It is hard to describe, but it is a good read.

United Kingdom on Mar 12, 2022

Dr Tolstoyevsky: The genius of Nabokov is obvious here: this is SUCH a well written book. Just brilliant!

United Kingdom on May 18, 2020

falconer: This is Nabokov's saddest book. There are plenty of sad and tragic people in his work at large - Luzhin, Smurov, Martin, Hermann, Fyodor, Sebastian, Pnin, Kinbote, Hugh - and of course poor Lo. But Cincinnatus, the hero of *Invitation to a Beheading*, has an endless pathos all his own. People in the other books fight back, or bluster along as best they can. But poor, innocent Cincinnatus, held in a cell on death row for a crime trumped up by the hideous regime under which he lives, is not, and never has been, a fighter or a blusterer. Good, quiet, meek, and terrified, Cincinnatus is duped, duped, and duped again by his horrible captors, who take delight in subjecting him to psychological torture in the days leading up to his date with the axe. It is, on Nabokov's part, a brilliant piece of invention - the wild, tacky, kitschy vulgarity of all his manifold punishers is superbly imagined, and beautifully set over against the simple goodness of a helpless creature all on his own. Read it for that. And then try to decide what to make of the ending. This is, as I say, Nabokov's saddest book. But it is also the book where his own thoughts of the afterlife have the biggest role to play....

United Kingdom on Sep 03, 2019

Paul Schuster: Chapter 4 of the rule of St. Benedict tells the monks, "Remember to keep death before your eyes daily." What would it be like to be such a person? What would it be like to be around such a person? Cincinnatus is sentenced to death. The name harkens back to a noble figure. In this case he is sentenced to death because he makes everyone around him uncomfortable (there are worse reasons.) But he does not know the date of his death...and here is the dramatic tension of the story. I remember when my Dad died. The next morning I went into my bank and a teller I knew well smiled and asked how I was doing. She had NO clue. I have worked with many families dealing with imminent death and I know they don't want me to ask how they are doing unless they know they can answer honestly. Cincinnatus is surrounded by people going through the motions of day-to-day life and cannot appreciate why this man waiting for death doesn't appreciate THEIR struggles. Of course, they are waiting for death too; they just don't appreciate it. This is my 6th book by Nabokov and I have loved them all. And I certainly see similarities between this book and works by Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Sartre ("The...

United States on Jan 27, 2019

ReviewMonkey: A great book and another one of Nabokov's best works. Dark, yet witty and with good character development this is a must read for fans of the author. Nice presentation and arrived quickly. Pleased.

United Kingdom on Nov 01, 2015

Ioana: 100 stars! This is by far one of the most absurd, imaginative, and metaphorically insightful works of art I have ever encountered - it is what I would imagine a Dali painting to be if it were a novel. It is also brilliantly written.

Invitation to a Beheading is a phenomenological exploration (in the tradition of Husserl, but more resembling Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology), serving to snap us out of our familiarity and out of our forgetting of the nature of our reality by continually inserting the ridiculous into the narrative: a family who brings their furniture with them to jail for a brief visit of an inmate; a spider who inhabits a cell with the protagonist and who is fed and coddled; an execution ceremony which resembles a circus/variety-show act; chairs and furniture that move at will, "and never spend the night in the same spot twice"; and seemingly nonsensical meanderings such as the observation that "an insane man mistakes his visiting kin for galaxies, logarithms, low-haunched hyenas".

I wouldn't say I *enjoyed* this work - though the book was relatively short, it took me weeks to trudge through it; still, it quickly became one of my "favorites", and a...

United States on Nov 13, 2014

Amazon Customer: This was a good book but the low rating is because I am comparing it to his others. Good but nowhere near his best

United Kingdom on Feb 05, 2014

Arheddis Vaarkingjaab: I only came to know of this early Nabokov novel by reading the wonderful "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi (highly recommended), a study of the relevance of literature in the personal quest for freedom from the crushing weight of oppression. Certainly the protagonist of "Invitation to a Beheading," Cincinnatus C., is a relevant case in point, given that he has been sentenced to death for an obscure crime (gnostical turpitude)and is constantly under the manipulatory pressures of absurd agents of the state. In this he is not at all unlike Nafisi and all the other victims of Khomeini's revolutionary guards who interpret the crimes as they go along. Others may find some parallels in modern America.
Many have compared this Nabokov (written in 1935) to Franz Kafka, but the wellspring is really more deeply rooted in the existential guilt that plagues the modern psyche. In earlier times, all shared in the social code of justice and understood the right and wrong, whether or not they agreed with it; but in the 20th century, there emerged a certain arbitrainess of authority that made potential criminals of all somewhere inside their minds. I think of the French author Celine in...

United States on Aug 23, 2007