Invitation to a Beheading

[LaLaLa Laura]

"Like Franz 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."

[Melanti]

I'm really looking forward to this one.

I've got a couple of group reads to finish off for November (The Woman in White and Red Earth and Pouring Rain) but as soon as I finish those, this is next up!

[Greg]

Just picked up a copy of this today Melanti. I liked Pale Fire; so I have fairly high hopes for this one.

[Melanti]

It took me longer than I expected to get around to this book. I went on vacation and was just too mellow to tackle it - it's certainly not beach reading material!

Definitely a very shifty, hallucinatory book. It kind of reminded me a tiny bit of Rushdie in places - but I think that's just the magic realism style aspects of it.


I really wish I'd read The Trial or The Castle so I could compare for myself - especially since Nabokov was so adamant that he has nothing in common with Kafka.

On my Nabokov scale, it ranks a bit above Pnin and a bit under Pale Fire.

[Melanti]

I'm sorry more people didn't get to read/discuss, though I admit it's not one of Nabokov's more accessible novels.

Just a quick update...

I read Kafka's The Trial a couple weeks ago and I can see why Nabokov didn't want it compared to his book. They're both pretty surreal, but they're surreal in different ways. Not sure how to really describe how, but it felt quite different to me.

And there's some vague similarities in plot, but I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo and I'm seeing just as many, if not more, between similarities between this novel and Nabokov's as I did between Kafka's and Nabokov's.

[Greg]

Melanti, I still intend to read it! I bought the book - I just ran out of runway on the month. I'll comment here while I'm reading it, even though it'll be well past the official group read ending (already passed).

[Melanti]

Greg - I'm going to be the exact same way for most of my group reads this month. I had meant to read the shorter ones before starting The Count ... but I started comparing translation styles and next thing I knew, I was 100 pages in! I'm not sure I'll get much at all read this month besides this one book.

Mary wrote: "I think it was The Trial that I saw one day on either TCM or you tube. I don't know. It was very creepy. If it's the big long dream one it stayed with me for awhile. I think it was directed by Ors..."

Hm. I wouldn't describe The Trial as a long dream, but a film version that treated it as a dream would probably work very well. It's already pretty surreal, so if you made that just a bit more prevalent, you'd get an rather good nightmare!