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Invitation to a Beheading
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Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Vintage
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Our Price: $10.40
You Save: $ 2.60 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Vintage
Average Customer Rating:
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Invitation to a Beheading Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.7342
EAN: 9780679725312
ISBN: 0679725318
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 240
Publication Date: 1989-09-19
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1989-09-19
Studio: Vintage
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.7342
EAN: 9780679725312
ISBN: 0679725318
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 240
Publication Date: 1989-09-19
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1989-09-19
Studio: Vintage
Editorial Review of Invitation to a Beheading
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude." an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers. an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws. who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed. he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.
Customer Reviews of Invitation to a Beheading
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: An Eerie Resemblance to Unreality
Review: Ask me any questions you may not have, friends. By mounting the reviewer's scaffold, I've sentenced myself to reply on behalf of the author, who is otherwise disposed. What's this book about, you ask? Why, the same thing all books are about, you and me. But what happens in it? That's an impertinent question! Why should my author be troubled to say what his book is about when you can read it for yourself. Humble apologies then, but is there a setting? Oh, there may or may not be a setting, or more precisely, a sitting, in a cell in a castle across a river from a town of exceptional ordinariness, but the cell shows all the hallmarks of quantum measurability. And characters? Yes, yes, one or more. A certain Cincinnatus, who bears a close resemblance to Schroedinger's cat, is encapsulated in his cells, as we all are, awaiting his death by beheading for the crime of gnostical turpitude, of which he would no doubt be guilty if he knew what it meant. His guard, the guard's small daughter, his lawyer, the warden, his wife and in-laws, his mother whom he doesn't know, and his executioner-to-be, an outlandish primo donno, all pop in and out of his cellular anomie like punch-and-judy puppets operated by sadistic voyeurs. Is the whole tale a fabulation in Cincinnatus's mind? No, of course not. Cincinnatus is a fabulation in the author's mind. Try to ask more sensible questions, please! Is this a fable of life in the dungeons of communism? That's enough! I can't continue to evade your questions on behalf of Mr. Nabokov if you don't frame them in surreal terms!
People have said about music that it is the most expressive of arts but that it's impossible to say precisely what it expresses. Nabokov's early writings - Invitation to a Beheading was written in Russian and published in Paris in 1938 - were immediately compared to the works of Franz Kafka, and although Nabokov disputes the association, I should think most readers would accept it. A determined reader could demand an either/or of this Beheading: either the whole thing is a `morbid' fantasy in the mind of a neurasthenic fellow whose name may be Cincinnatus, or the `real' Cincinnatus is absorbed in fretful day dreams which are brought to a final page only with his actual death. I prefer to dodge either/or questions, being a musician, and to suggest that Invitation to a Beheading is music, and therefore means whatever I think it means. You, dear reader, are welcome to share my musical appreciation.
Here's how Nabokov describes Cincinnatus's departure from his cell en route to the scaffold: Cincinnatus, who, alas, had suddenly lost the capacity of walking, was supported by M'sieur Pierre [the executioner] and a soldier with the face of a borzoi. For a very long time they clambered up and down staircases - the fortress must have suffered a mild stroke, as the descending stairs were in reality ascending and vice versa. Again there were long corridors, but of a more inhabited kind; that is, they visibly demonstrated - either by linoleum, or by wallpaper, or by a sea chest against the wall - that they adjoined living quarters. At one bend there was even a smell of cabbage soup. Further on they passed a glass door with the inscription "ffice," and after another period of darkness they abruptly found themselves in the courtyard, vibrant with the noonday sun.
Now then, dear amazonian book shoppers, you'll have to join the throng of townspeople hastening toward the place of execution in order to sop up the sanguinary verbiage at the foot of the scaffold.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Dream or Reality?
Review: Most of the enjoyment with this book is the discovery of Nabokov's creation. Frankly, I suggest that you skip the reviews here, close your eyes for the moment and simply read the book - the same recommendation that I make for most of his books. Read the comments later.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899 to 1977) is a Russian born writer who went to Cambridge, lived in western Europe, then in the US, and finally retired to Switzerland. He has a medium sized body of work with numerous novels, short works, and his non-fiction. Most know him for his 1955 creation of Lolita, which he wrote and re-wrote for over twenty years before the final product. It was based on a real life French story, but set in America. He has 20 novels.
Eleven of Nabokov's novels come from his early European period when he could write in many languages but he wrote his first 11 novels all in Russian. This is one of those, one of his last novels, and it was published in 1938 as a book.
The book is not about an invitation to a beheading as much as it is about a man on death row. Without giving away the plot, it describes in a very fanciful and unrealistic way, but in a creative fashion as Nabokov can do, the life a prisoner on death row and the people who come to visit.
The man is in a jail or in the fortress which is the jail in a small French town. His name is Cincinnatus. We are never told what crime he has commited. He is visited by his lawyer, the jailer, the jail supervisor, his family, etc. To say much more would be to give away the story.
As with some of his other novels, it is part reality and part mental images or dreams. It is left to the reader to sort out which is which.
I think it is good; it is interesting; but not his best work.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Everybody's havin' them dreams
Review: 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 this context, as well as an unpublished novel of my own written almost 40 years ago.
So it is easy to see how Nafisi could apply the parallels to her situation in Tehran, forced to veil, forced to accept, unable to flee, to the situation of Cincinnatus C. I think that anyone who has lived an even mildly contemplative life can feel the constriction that such or any arbitrary authority causes.
But what I really want to say about "Invitation to a Beheading" is a bit more personal in nature. Have you ever awoken from a complex dream and thought, "I wish I could write this down, it's really a good story"? No one I have ever read, including Joyce, has done as well at capturing a dream state as Nabokov does in the early pages of "Invitation." And, as if to prove it is not a fluke or a lucky break, he comes back to it again and again, right up until the powerful closing scene.
"Invitation to a Beheading" is a powerful dream that too many of us have had, deep in our own gnostical turpitude. It is almost miraculous that one could capture it so well, especially one such as Nabokov whom we know for his open-eyed precision in the later works. But miraculous or not, our heightened ability to relate to it does not say good things about where we have come in the early days of the 21st century.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A violin in a void
Review: Invitation to a Beheading is a short novel written during Nabokov's prolific Berlin phase in his late 20s and 30s, (if you have only read Nabokov's more famous later works, written in English, such as Lolita, Ada and Pale Fire then I urge you to pick up his emigre period novels, all of them available in translation). It is not one of his greatest works, but it is a compelling tale of the last 19 days of Cincinattus, a mild mannered non conformist who is imprisoned in bizzarre and surreal circumstances (his crime: gnostical turpitude) and spends his final days leading up to his execution, the date of which he is not told despite his repeated exhortions to his jailers.
The story is a touching piece of dystopian literature (a genre I confess to not being overly familiar with, I have read The Trial by Kafka, but not 1984 by Orwell - a shocking solecism I know, I vow to rectify it soon). Cincinattus is tormented by his captors who eat his food, use his cell as an office and play games which Cincinattus has to muster all of his remaning dignity to avoid falling into. The most tender scenes are those where he writes - a doomed literature, much like the censored writers struggling under Stalinism, who knows his work will never be read. He writes, to preserve something of himself, to avoid his essence vanishing alltogether: 'I am trembling over the paper, chewing the pencil through to the lead, hunching over to conceal myself from the door through which a piercing eye stings me in the nape.'
Those little stylistic bursts of pure writing talent are the main reason I read Nabokov. For me he is the greatest stylist of 20th Century Literature. Only Nabokov could produce a sentence like the following, the final sentence of chapter 7, when Cincinattus's reading has been interrupted by the bullying guards, who have snatched a vase of peonies, splashing water: 'Cincinnatus kept staring into the book. A drop had fallen onto the page. Through the drop several letters turned from brevier to pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.'
Joyce, Updike et all, would kill to be able to write prose that beautiful.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not up to the standard that Nabokov set for himself later on
Review: "Invitation" gives you a glimpse at the ghosts of Nabokov future. It shows off his love of little turns of phrase; eventually his style became more abstract, and the words themselves -- rather than the images they represented -- the center of attention. It also contains the barest outlines of his future cynicism toward reviewers, other writers, and even his reader. (Indeed, I'm never sure whether he likes anyone. I suspect he's the perfect misanthrope.)
This book, though, is not nearly as captivating as his later works. It only inspires me to go to the opposite end of his career and read "Ada, or Ardor." Those who've not experienced Nabokov would do well to read "Lolita," which despite its fame as some kind of highbrow erotica is not even vaguely so; indeed, the Vintage edition comes with Nabokov's (as always, astringent) response to those who think it pornographic. You could also try his autobiography "Speak, Memory," but it's always felt like Nabokov's flights of imagery were getting too self-satisfied in that book: yes, Nabokov, we know you're a stylist; now say something.
After "Lolita," I'd recommend "Pale Fire." It's Nabokov as his best and worst: stylistic fun, a maddeningly elusive story, and the sense that you're the victim of a very long joke.
As with all the Nabokov I've read, "Invitation to a Beheading" is worth reading. It's just that some of his books are more worth reading than others. In a life with finite time, I don't think one has time for "Invitation to a Beheading."
Review Summary: An Eerie Resemblance to Unreality
Review: Ask me any questions you may not have, friends. By mounting the reviewer's scaffold, I've sentenced myself to reply on behalf of the author, who is otherwise disposed. What's this book about, you ask? Why, the same thing all books are about, you and me. But what happens in it? That's an impertinent question! Why should my author be troubled to say what his book is about when you can read it for yourself. Humble apologies then, but is there a setting? Oh, there may or may not be a setting, or more precisely, a sitting, in a cell in a castle across a river from a town of exceptional ordinariness, but the cell shows all the hallmarks of quantum measurability. And characters? Yes, yes, one or more. A certain Cincinnatus, who bears a close resemblance to Schroedinger's cat, is encapsulated in his cells, as we all are, awaiting his death by beheading for the crime of gnostical turpitude, of which he would no doubt be guilty if he knew what it meant. His guard, the guard's small daughter, his lawyer, the warden, his wife and in-laws, his mother whom he doesn't know, and his executioner-to-be, an outlandish primo donno, all pop in and out of his cellular anomie like punch-and-judy puppets operated by sadistic voyeurs. Is the whole tale a fabulation in Cincinnatus's mind? No, of course not. Cincinnatus is a fabulation in the author's mind. Try to ask more sensible questions, please! Is this a fable of life in the dungeons of communism? That's enough! I can't continue to evade your questions on behalf of Mr. Nabokov if you don't frame them in surreal terms!
People have said about music that it is the most expressive of arts but that it's impossible to say precisely what it expresses. Nabokov's early writings - Invitation to a Beheading was written in Russian and published in Paris in 1938 - were immediately compared to the works of Franz Kafka, and although Nabokov disputes the association, I should think most readers would accept it. A determined reader could demand an either/or of this Beheading: either the whole thing is a `morbid' fantasy in the mind of a neurasthenic fellow whose name may be Cincinnatus, or the `real' Cincinnatus is absorbed in fretful day dreams which are brought to a final page only with his actual death. I prefer to dodge either/or questions, being a musician, and to suggest that Invitation to a Beheading is music, and therefore means whatever I think it means. You, dear reader, are welcome to share my musical appreciation.
Here's how Nabokov describes Cincinnatus's departure from his cell en route to the scaffold: Cincinnatus, who, alas, had suddenly lost the capacity of walking, was supported by M'sieur Pierre [the executioner] and a soldier with the face of a borzoi. For a very long time they clambered up and down staircases - the fortress must have suffered a mild stroke, as the descending stairs were in reality ascending and vice versa. Again there were long corridors, but of a more inhabited kind; that is, they visibly demonstrated - either by linoleum, or by wallpaper, or by a sea chest against the wall - that they adjoined living quarters. At one bend there was even a smell of cabbage soup. Further on they passed a glass door with the inscription "ffice," and after another period of darkness they abruptly found themselves in the courtyard, vibrant with the noonday sun.
Now then, dear amazonian book shoppers, you'll have to join the throng of townspeople hastening toward the place of execution in order to sop up the sanguinary verbiage at the foot of the scaffold.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Dream or Reality?
Review: Most of the enjoyment with this book is the discovery of Nabokov's creation. Frankly, I suggest that you skip the reviews here, close your eyes for the moment and simply read the book - the same recommendation that I make for most of his books. Read the comments later.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899 to 1977) is a Russian born writer who went to Cambridge, lived in western Europe, then in the US, and finally retired to Switzerland. He has a medium sized body of work with numerous novels, short works, and his non-fiction. Most know him for his 1955 creation of Lolita, which he wrote and re-wrote for over twenty years before the final product. It was based on a real life French story, but set in America. He has 20 novels.
Eleven of Nabokov's novels come from his early European period when he could write in many languages but he wrote his first 11 novels all in Russian. This is one of those, one of his last novels, and it was published in 1938 as a book.
The book is not about an invitation to a beheading as much as it is about a man on death row. Without giving away the plot, it describes in a very fanciful and unrealistic way, but in a creative fashion as Nabokov can do, the life a prisoner on death row and the people who come to visit.
The man is in a jail or in the fortress which is the jail in a small French town. His name is Cincinnatus. We are never told what crime he has commited. He is visited by his lawyer, the jailer, the jail supervisor, his family, etc. To say much more would be to give away the story.
As with some of his other novels, it is part reality and part mental images or dreams. It is left to the reader to sort out which is which.
I think it is good; it is interesting; but not his best work.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Everybody's havin' them dreams
Review: 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 this context, as well as an unpublished novel of my own written almost 40 years ago.
So it is easy to see how Nafisi could apply the parallels to her situation in Tehran, forced to veil, forced to accept, unable to flee, to the situation of Cincinnatus C. I think that anyone who has lived an even mildly contemplative life can feel the constriction that such or any arbitrary authority causes.
But what I really want to say about "Invitation to a Beheading" is a bit more personal in nature. Have you ever awoken from a complex dream and thought, "I wish I could write this down, it's really a good story"? No one I have ever read, including Joyce, has done as well at capturing a dream state as Nabokov does in the early pages of "Invitation." And, as if to prove it is not a fluke or a lucky break, he comes back to it again and again, right up until the powerful closing scene.
"Invitation to a Beheading" is a powerful dream that too many of us have had, deep in our own gnostical turpitude. It is almost miraculous that one could capture it so well, especially one such as Nabokov whom we know for his open-eyed precision in the later works. But miraculous or not, our heightened ability to relate to it does not say good things about where we have come in the early days of the 21st century.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A violin in a void
Review: Invitation to a Beheading is a short novel written during Nabokov's prolific Berlin phase in his late 20s and 30s, (if you have only read Nabokov's more famous later works, written in English, such as Lolita, Ada and Pale Fire then I urge you to pick up his emigre period novels, all of them available in translation). It is not one of his greatest works, but it is a compelling tale of the last 19 days of Cincinattus, a mild mannered non conformist who is imprisoned in bizzarre and surreal circumstances (his crime: gnostical turpitude) and spends his final days leading up to his execution, the date of which he is not told despite his repeated exhortions to his jailers.
The story is a touching piece of dystopian literature (a genre I confess to not being overly familiar with, I have read The Trial by Kafka, but not 1984 by Orwell - a shocking solecism I know, I vow to rectify it soon). Cincinattus is tormented by his captors who eat his food, use his cell as an office and play games which Cincinattus has to muster all of his remaning dignity to avoid falling into. The most tender scenes are those where he writes - a doomed literature, much like the censored writers struggling under Stalinism, who knows his work will never be read. He writes, to preserve something of himself, to avoid his essence vanishing alltogether: 'I am trembling over the paper, chewing the pencil through to the lead, hunching over to conceal myself from the door through which a piercing eye stings me in the nape.'
Those little stylistic bursts of pure writing talent are the main reason I read Nabokov. For me he is the greatest stylist of 20th Century Literature. Only Nabokov could produce a sentence like the following, the final sentence of chapter 7, when Cincinattus's reading has been interrupted by the bullying guards, who have snatched a vase of peonies, splashing water: 'Cincinnatus kept staring into the book. A drop had fallen onto the page. Through the drop several letters turned from brevier to pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.'
Joyce, Updike et all, would kill to be able to write prose that beautiful.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not up to the standard that Nabokov set for himself later on
Review: "Invitation" gives you a glimpse at the ghosts of Nabokov future. It shows off his love of little turns of phrase; eventually his style became more abstract, and the words themselves -- rather than the images they represented -- the center of attention. It also contains the barest outlines of his future cynicism toward reviewers, other writers, and even his reader. (Indeed, I'm never sure whether he likes anyone. I suspect he's the perfect misanthrope.)
This book, though, is not nearly as captivating as his later works. It only inspires me to go to the opposite end of his career and read "Ada, or Ardor." Those who've not experienced Nabokov would do well to read "Lolita," which despite its fame as some kind of highbrow erotica is not even vaguely so; indeed, the Vintage edition comes with Nabokov's (as always, astringent) response to those who think it pornographic. You could also try his autobiography "Speak, Memory," but it's always felt like Nabokov's flights of imagery were getting too self-satisfied in that book: yes, Nabokov, we know you're a stylist; now say something.
After "Lolita," I'd recommend "Pale Fire." It's Nabokov as his best and worst: stylistic fun, a maddeningly elusive story, and the sense that you're the victim of a very long joke.
As with all the Nabokov I've read, "Invitation to a Beheading" is worth reading. It's just that some of his books are more worth reading than others. In a life with finite time, I don't think one has time for "Invitation to a Beheading."