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.

Invitation to a Beheading

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A Paperback / softback by Vladimir Nabokov

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    View other formats and editions of Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

    Publisher: Random House USA Inc
    Publication Date: 19/09/1989
    ISBN13: 9780679725312, 978-0679725312
    ISBN10: 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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