Invitation to a Beheading

Fiction & Literature, Literary
Cover of the book Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Author: Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 9780307787354
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication: February 16, 2011
Imprint: Vintage Language: English
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN: 9780307787354
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication: February 16, 2011
Imprint: Vintage
Language: English

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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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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