Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

"Today is the eight day" (wrote Cincinnatus with the pencil, which had lost more than a third of its length) "and not only am I still alive, that is, the sphere of my own self still limits and eclipses my being, but, like any other mortal, I do not know my mortal hour and can apply to myself a formula that holds for everyone: the probability of a future decreases in inverse proportion to its theoretical remoteness. Of course in my case discretion requires that I think in term of very small numbers--but that is all right, that is all right--I am alive."

Cincinnatus C. has been sentenced to death for a vague crime specified only as "gnostical turpitude." He sits in jail, tortured not by the certainty of his sentence but its uncertainty: he has no idea when the hour of his execution will come; no one will tell him. Maybe nobody knows. In the meantime, he shares his cell with a persistent spider and a zealous jailor, and soon a cell mate, a noxious little snob named M'sieur Pierre. He has time enough for visits, each one with its own cryptic refusal to provide any closure: his absent mother, his unfaithful wife, her large and vituperative family. He orders books from the library, and reads the newspaper, though references to himself are cut out of it. And he writes.

In the passage above, Nabokov makes explicit a central fact that underpins Invitation to a Beheading: Cincinnatus is basically in the same position as all of us. We all know we must die, but none of us knows the hour. Cincinnatus' life is lived on a contracted scale, but in its nature, he's like everyone else. Understanding this, his scribbling becomes especially poignant: over and over, in his writings, Cincinnatus expresses the desire to be able to express himself clearly, but he always feels that he has not quite said what it is he means to say. The desire, made urgent by the ticking clock, is a kind of manifesto about writing: the desire to say something real, and the understanding that there is limited time in which to say it.

Invitation to a Beheading is one of those capital-L Literature books about the Human Condition: the certainty of death, and what we do with it. Nabokov claims in the introduction that he had never read Kafka's The Trial when he wrote Beheading, and though the surface similarities are the same, there's nothing in the novel about authoritarians or autocrats. Cincinnatus is not degraded by his sentence, not tortured or physically punished; in fact, his jailors seem eager to treat him as some kind of honored guest, much to his annoyance. It's funny, actually; after having been chased out of Russia by the revolution, Nabokov would have had reason to imbue his prison story with such flavors, but he reaches for something much more universal.

Invitation to a Beheading is very funny, more Beckett than Kafka. It even has a kind of Vaudevillian flair to it, with Cincinnatus acting as the straight man to an increasingly mad world. Its best parts, I think, are actually the stream-of-consciousness writings that Cincinnatus pours out onto the page--though he may be dissatisfied with them, the pathos of their insufficiency really only makes them more touching. I was also taken with the novel's final scenes, which resolve the dreary questions of foreshadowing and climax--what will happen to Cincinnatus?--with a dreamy flare of imagination.