INVITATION TO A BEHEADING - VLADIMIR NABOKOV (trans. DMITRI NABOKOV)

I’m not sure why I haven’t read more Nabokov. I’ve done Lolita and Pale Fire and loved them both but I haven’t ventured further than that. The library here has a bunch of them, and I grabbed Invitation at quasi-random. All I knew was that it was one of the Russian novels and that it has a reputation as being really Kafka-esque. That turned out to be wrong. It shares The Trail’s basic premise, namely that someone is caught in a vast legal system they don’t understand, but otherwise the tone is quite different. Kafka is sad and absurd, this book is absurd but it’s much funnier and zanier. The book begins with the main character, Cincinnatus C., being condemned to death and ends with his beheading. The 200 or so pages in between chronicles his time between these two events. He sits in his cell and contemplates what will happen to him. He tries to figure out what he is even being charged with. He talks with his jailers and cell-mates. The family visits him but they bring all their own furniture. There are lots of funny absurd details like a spider in the cell that the jailer keeps feeding and a photo album that, in a sort of anticipation of AI videos, shows the imagined future of a child he knows. The writing is unbelievable. Every page includes a wonderful turn of phrase, like, “an evil drowsiness” or image, like finding out the spider we’ve followed the whole book is a toy. I have to believe that Vlad himself had a lot to do with this translation, though he claims in the forward that his son did almost all of it. I really admired the pacing of the book. He sets a pretty closed world for himself, a man in a jail cell, but each chapter, which all are almost exactly equal in length at ~10 pages (the ideal length for reading two before bed), features a short little, almost self-contained episode. And it doesn’t overstay its welcome, the book says what it has to say, moves forward constantly and ends at a climax. On that note, spoilers alert, I’d like to complain briefly about the packaging of this book. This Vintage International edition contains a description on the back that includes some major spoilers. It tells us what happens at the execution, which is the climax. It was so jarring to see this that I assumed the execution happened early in the book and the rest of the book was about the aftermath, but no, the book just spoils it (along with a number of other episodes, this book isn’t a thriller nor does it have major twists, but the back still tells us a small handful of things that it would have been more fun to discover myself). Also, the book jacket is wrong about what happens. The book claims that Cincinnatus, “simply wills his executioners out of existence; they disappear, along with the world they inhabit.” that is not what it seemed like to me, it seems instead that the last passage of the book, where Cincinnatus gets up from the execution block and wonders into the crowd as the world dissolves around him as he makes his way towards,”beings akin to him” is an image of him dying and his soul leaving his body. Either way, great little book, I will certainly be checking out more Nabokov.