A violin in a void: Invitation to a Beheading is a short novel written during Nabokov's prolific Berlin phase in his late 20s and 30s, (if you have only read Nabokov's more famous later works, written in English, such as Lolita, Ada and Pale Fire then I urge you to pick up his emigre period novels, all of them available in translation). It is not one of his greatest works, but it is a compelling tale of the last 19 days of Cincinattus, a mild mannered non conformist who is imprisoned in bizzarre and surreal circumstances (his crime: gnostical turpitude) and spends his final days leading up to his execution, the date of which he is not told despite his repeated exhortions to his jailers.

The story is a touching piece of dystopian literature (a genre I confess to not being overly familiar with, I have read The Trial by Kafka, but not 1984 by Orwell - a shocking solecism I know, I vow to rectify it soon). Cincinattus is tormented by his captors who eat his food, use his cell as an office and play games which Cincinattus has to muster all of his remaning dignity to avoid falling into. The most tender scenes are those where he writes - a doomed literature, much like the censored writers struggling under Stalinism, who knows his work will never be read. He writes, to preserve something of himself, to avoid his essence vanishing alltogether: 'I am trembling over the paper, chewing the pencil through to the lead, hunching over to conceal myself from the door through which a piercing eye stings me in the nape.'

Those little stylistic bursts of pure writing talent are the main reason I read Nabokov. For me he is the greatest stylist of 20th Century Literature. Only Nabokov could produce a sentence like the following, the final sentence of chapter 7, when Cincinattus's reading has been interrupted by the bullying guards, who have snatched a vase of peonies, splashing water: 'Cincinnatus kept staring into the book. A drop had fallen onto the page. Through the drop several letters turned from brevier to pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.'

Joyce, Updike et all, would kill to be able to write prose that beautiful.

This is a truly fantastic book. I know this is a bold statement, but I think it should be regarded as a classic!

Invitation to a Beheading is the story of the imprisonment of Cinncinatus, a man who has been sentenced to death for a crime no one will actually mention. His time in prison devolves into a dream-like series of bizarre events as he struggles to comes to terms with the end of his life. In the end, the book is a powerful comment on submission and acceptance. I would recommend this novel to anyone. ( )

http://sarahbbc.wordpress.com/2008/12... ( )

What a bizarre little book! Hilarious in some parts, heartbreaking in others, brilliant throughout, with a neat little twist at the end. I was surprised, but it really makes perfect sense (and is maybe the only part of the novel that does). Nabokov's imagination never fails to impress. ( )

Even better the second time around. The tragedy of the absurd is deeply felt. ( )