Invitation to a Beheading

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Fascinating - Rated
Nabokov himself considered this one of his more important works. It is rich in symbolism and imagery, it is penetrating about the interaction between the individual and society and it conveys a vivid picture of a baffling world in which the banal are capable of extreme cruelty - for someone who managed to escape both the rigours of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany by the skin of his teeth, Nabokov understood the totalitarian state and its modus operandi incredibly clearly.

He is not one of us - Rated
Set in the prison-fortress of an unnamed state, Invitation To A Beheading is a darkly surreal tale chronicling the last days of Cincinnatus C., a man condemned and sentenced to death for . . well, what exactly? Apart from the phrase "Gnostical Turpitude" and subtle accusations of being "opaque", his crime is never properly revealed, although throughout the story we learn (courtesy of Cincinnatus's fragmented scribblings) that he is in some way different or special. At one point he recalls levitating out of a window. In a different memory he hears people whispering: "He is not one of us." Whatever the true nature of his crime is, at the story's start Cincinnatus is found guilty and led to a yellow-walled cell where for twenty days he is tormented in peculiar ways by his keepers (an oddly normal bunch to be sure!). As time passes, Cincinnatus increasingly believes his jailers to be nothing else but animated dummies playing out their roles in a perverse game. At the finale, the moment of the execution, all appears to be explained. With fluid prose and smoke-&-mirrors imagery Nabokov creates an absurd, strange, and ultimately sublime snapshot of a dissolving life.

Hasty and shallow - Rated
With the possible exception of juvenilia such as _Glory_, this is the least important and least compelling of Nabokov's works. The dream-like frustration it portrays does not seem to have any emotional impact for the author (in stark contrast to the handling of such situations by Kafka, to whose work this one is inevitably compared). The language is loose and diffuse: the Nabokov of _Lolita_ or _Pnin_ would have told the same story, with more zest and intelligence, in half the words. This (together with _Bend Sinister_) should be at the bottom of your Nabokov list.

Great book - Rated
Nabokovs writing is exquisite. His words roll off the page like skies on a never-ending slope, encouraging and inticing readers not to put a book down.

This novel concerntrates on the depressions of a convicted criminal sentenced to death by decapitation for reasons not disclosed and takes place from the time he is sentenced to 3 weeks later when the penalty is (or isn't?) carried out. You get a real feel for Cincinnatus' helplesness when nobody will answer him a simple and straight question and when all the characters about him are just flippant and overbearingly unconcerned with the situation he is in. Some of the blunt dialogue made me laugh out loud. The author delves deep into the soul of the main character through his writing his final memoir and his desperate thoughts out loud.

This book is quick to read and flows like rapids and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a first Nabakov read. Perfection.

If Lolita is the best, this is the second best... - Rated
Nabokov wrote this book in two weeks. As a result the book is fast paced, as is the reading. I couldnt stop reading it until I was finished.
The author denies having read Kafka before writing this book. The fact is that the "strangeness" of the story is akin to Kafkas works. A man that finds himself in a starnge situation (in this case, convicted to death) without any aparent reason, surrounded by stranger characters. As for the end of the book, without giving it away, all I can say is that it is Amazingly puzling... Great book from a great author!