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Invitation to a Beheading

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About this listen

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.

©1935 Vladimir Nabokov (P)2010 Audible, Inc. Absurdist Classics Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literary History & Criticism Russian & Soviet Science Fiction World Literature

Critic reviews

"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." (John Updike)
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This is strange novel, and, despite Nabakov being unaware of his work, very Kafkaesque in tone. Playful and menacing it highlights that strangely modern and ancient interplay between horror and entertainment.

Haunting and wonderfully sinister

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This book is perfect if you're of the kind to understand. The narrator is exceptional.

Masterpiece

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