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...
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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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780679725312 (0679725318)
Publish date: September 19th 1989
Publisher: Vintage
Pages no: 223
Edition language: English
Category:
Fantasy,
Classics,
Novels,
Science Fiction,
Literature,
Cultural,
Literary Fiction,
20th Century,
Russia,
Russian Literature,
Dystopia,
Surreal
My copy of Invitation to a Beheading starts with a foreword where Nabakov specifically denies any connection to a number of authors, singling out Orwell and Kafka in particular for no denial. Nabakov is a writer who is particularly unreliable in what he says about his own work, and Orwell and Kafka...
Fifty pages in, I feel like I've given this a good shake and I can move on. You have to care about something when you read a book: the story, a character, maybe even the technique. Something, at any rate. Nothing comes to mind for this one. While Nabokov stated in an interview that of all his novel...
What a feeling of loneliness I felt was evoked by this text...
In a world where translucency is valued and opaqueness is a social sin, a man finds himself convicted of a crime he didn't commit, but can't plead innocent to. In Invitation to a Beheading we get to spend some time with him as he awaits his impending decapitation.I don't think anyone else could have...
Man..., this book is seriously weird...
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