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Book Synopsis
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.

Invitation to a Beheading

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    A Paperback / softback by Vladimir Nabokov

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      Book details

      Publisher Penguin Random House Group
      Imprint Random House Inc
      Published 19 September 1989
      ISBN-13 9780679725312
      978-0679725312
      ISBN-10 0679725318
      Also in:
      Literature: history and criticism Books by Vladimir Nabokov

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      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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