by Vladimir Nabokov
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...
imagination versus reality, utopia versus dystopia. often compared to kafka's "the trial" and orwell's "1984". i liked:the constant feeling of watching an absurd theatre playchapter 18chapter 19 [absolutely delicious:]pierre, the executioner. you love to hate himthe spidercincinnatus - the name. it ...
I recently picked this book up again and pretended that Jeremy Irons was reading it to me and that made it really great. So great, I bumped it up from three to four (four!) stars.
I see that the review on the GR home page for Invitation to a Beheading compares it to Kafka. It's clear that Nabokov heard this rather more frequently than he wanted to, and was very tired of it. In the foreword to my edition, he has the following comment:"Emigré reviewers, who were puzzled but lik...
Log in with Facebook 
