When most people hear the name Vladimir Nabokov, they immediately think of the novel, Lolita. But Nabokov was quite a prolific writer, penning more than twenty novels and short story collections in his lifetime. He was also well known as a poet, a critic and a translator.
In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov creates a dream-like world that's utterly irrational and thoroughly entrancing. A young man, Cincinnatus, is accused and imprisoned awaiting beheading for "gnostical turpitude," a crime that is never defined.
While he awaits his punishment, Cincinnatus is subjected to visits from not only his jailer, his unfaithful wife, her lover and her family, but also from his executioner masquerading as a fellow prisoner.
I have my own interpretation of this book, and Cincinnatus' wife, Marthe, figures prominently in my conjecture. She has been repeatedly unfaithful to Cincinnatus throughout their entire marriage. In his thoughts and writings that flash back to his life, we see that his wife has been a constant source of personal torment for Cincinnatus. It is my belief that Cincinnatus has gone mad from this torment and imprisons his own mind in a fantastic yet wholly psychological prison, where he attempts to find a kernel of reality to cling to.
What seem to be flashbacks, in my opinion, are the only reality, and serve as a framework that Cincinnatus uses to build up an understanding of his own role in freeing himself. There are passages in the book that I feel would support my interpretation.
There are many references of a duplicity of living one Cincinnatus will say or do something irrational while the other remains seated. At one point, Nabokov describes Cincinnatus as "like a man unable to resist arguing with a hallucination, even though he knows perfectly well that the entire masquerade is staged in his own brain." Elsewhere in the book, Cincinnatus contemplates the characters and visitors in his prison "and by evoking them -- not believing in them, perhaps, but still evoking them -- Cincinnatus allowed them the right to exist, supported them, nourished them with himself."
In what has to be one of the most brilliant endings of any novel I've read, Cincinnatus escapes his beheading by simply willing it all to disappear, just as the blade is about to drop. A psychological victory of reason over his torment.
This is not a novel for those who like straight and simple storylines. But it is extremely rewarding for the reader who enjoys a challenge, and who revels in the unexpected.
