Invitation to a Beheading
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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By:
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Vladimir Nabokov
About this listen
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.
©1935 Vladimir Nabokov (P)2010 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Sergey and Marina Dyachenko mix dramatic scenes with romance, action and wit, in a style both direct and lyrical. Written with a sure artistic hand, The Scar is the story of a man driven by his own feverish demons to find redemption and the woman who just might save him. Egert is a brash, confident member of the elite guards and an egotistical philanderer. But after he kills an innocent student in a duel, a mysterious man known as “The Wanderer” challenges Egert and slashes his face with his sword, leaving Egert with a scar that comes to symbolize his cowardice.
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Highly, highly, Highly Recommended
- By Robert on 08-13-12
By: Sergey Dyachenko, and others
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The Pale Blue Eye
- By: Louis Bayard
- Narrated by: Charles Leggett
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When the body of a suicide victim disappears at West Point Military Academy in 1831, only to be discovered hours later missing its heart, the Academy calls on retired detective Gus Landor to investigate. Landor is something of a legend among his peers, noted for an uncanny, Holmesian ability to read people. When Edgar Allan Poe, a new cadet, comes forth with his own cryptic conclusion—that the man Landor is looking for is a poet—Landor is intrigued and enlists Poe as his assistant.
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Could not get through it
- By Amazon Customer on 10-25-15
By: Louis Bayard
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The Unseen
- A Novel
- By: Katherine Webb
- Narrated by: Clare Wille
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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A vicar with a passion for nature, the Reverend Albert Canning leads a happy existence with his naive wife, Hester, in their sleepy Berkshire village in the year 1911. But as the English summer dawns, the Cannings' lives are forever changed by two new arrivals: Cat, their new maid, a disaffected, free-spirited young woman sent down from London after entanglements with the law; and Robin Durrant, a leading expert in the occult, enticed by tales of elemental beings in the water meadows nearby.
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Great book!
- By Dana on 09-03-12
By: Katherine Webb
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The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
- A Novel
- By: Imogen Hermes Gowar
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1780s London, a prosperous merchant finds his quiet life upended when he unexpectedly receives an unusual creature - and meets a most extraordinary woman - in this much-lauded, atmospheric debut that examines our capacity for wonder, obsession, and desire. One September evening in 1785, Jonah Hancock hears an urgent knocking on his front door near the docks of London. The captain of one of Jonah’s trading vessels is waiting eagerly on the front step, bearing shocking news. On a voyage to the Far East, he sold the Jonah’s ship for something rare and far more precious: a mermaid.
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Gave up
- By Isabella Piestrzynska on 10-27-18
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Fludd
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin - or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action.
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Small, tight irreverant novel that wryly inverts
- By Darwin8u on 07-21-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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We the Living
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Mary Woods
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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We the Living portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives. At its center is a girl whose passionate love is her fortress against the cruelty and oppression of a totalitarian state. Rand said of this book: "It is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write."
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Emotionally intense, historically authentic
- By Geoffrey on 08-14-08
By: Ayn Rand
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The Janissary Tree
- A Novel
- By: Jason Goodwin
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Togalu, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch.
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Interesting premise, annoying narrator
- By Phillipa Somerville on 09-18-07
By: Jason Goodwin
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Liesl & Po
- By: Kei Acedera, Lauren Oliver
- Narrated by: Jim Dale
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Liesl lives in a tiny attic bedroom, locked away by her cruel stepmother. Her only friends are the shadows and the mice - until one night a ghost appears from the darkness. It is Po, who comes from the Other Side. Both Liesl and Po are lonely, but together they are less alone. That same night, an alchemist's apprentice, Will, bungles an important delivery. He accidentally switches a box containing the most powerful magic in the world with one containing something decidedly less remarkable. Will's mistake has tremendous consequences for Liesl and Po....
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Great story made better by a great narrator
- By Marie on 09-16-12
By: Kei Acedera, and others
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Fear
- By: L. Ron Hubbard
- Narrated by: Roddy McDowall
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
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Professor James Lowry didn’t believe in spirits, or witches, or demons. Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn’t remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing - slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember.
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The Best of Hubbard
- By JJ on 01-31-15
By: L. Ron Hubbard
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Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book
- By: Jennifer Donnelly
- Narrated by: Jenna Augen
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Hidden in the Beast's library is a very mysterious book. Belle is about to discover it and visit a glittering new world. But is everything in that world what it seems? And will Belle be able to find her way home? Or will the story take hold of her - and never let her go?
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Naive Belle
- By De-Anna on 08-02-18
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Ironskin
- By: Tina Connolly
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
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Jane Eliot wears an iron mask. It's the only way to contain the fey curse that scars her cheek. The Great War is five years gone, but its scattered victims remain—the ironskin. When a carefully worded listing appears for a governess to assist with a “delicate situation”—a child born during the Great War—Jane is certain the child is fey-cursed, and that she can help.
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Light Fantasy With A Compelling Story
- By Jeff Jackson on 11-14-12
By: Tina Connolly
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
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Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
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Speak, Mnemosyne!
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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An amazing feat for such a unique novel
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Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
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Death is often the point of life's joke
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Life and chess are such lonely battles
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
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A dry run at big, complex themes
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From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
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A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
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Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
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A literary critique of Russian lit.
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This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.
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A non-Euclidean German love triangle.
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Nabokov’s fourth novel, The Eye, is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed.
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Ego vero, ergo sum
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Nabokov's black salad devouring a green rabbit
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Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
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An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
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Look at the Harlequins!
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As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).
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Peek, Memory!
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The Trial
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If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.
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We are all the straw that breaks a camel's back
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Solenoid
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Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
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Our Universal Phantasmagoria
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What listeners say about Invitation to a Beheading
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- C
- 09-09-11
I enjoyed it--but not for everyone
Narration--excellent. I've read several of his books and liked them all. This is an unconventional tale. If you like Kafka you'll like this.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 06-13-24
esoteric mysticism with a fantastical world
loved the abstract and pure nabokovian prose that's brings you into a vivid and strange world
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- Timothy Blevins
- 05-29-22
It's OK.
Interesting idea as a concept, but just a bit too cartoonish for me to truly accept the premise. I reached the same eventual point as the protagonist, but after about 10% of the story. He took until the end.
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- JP
- 05-18-11
Great tale, poor narration voice.
The story itself is good. It is interesting and thought provoking. The narrators gravel voice distracts form the tale and was not pleasant. It was very difficult to get past this and get into the book. I would read the authors other books instead of listening to this narrator again.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Bruce R
- 12-07-21
Nabokov, beguiling
Typical of some of his work, he draws you in, makes you think, you listen again, you enjoy hidden humor, you enjoy the varying states of reality that only Nabokov can deliver. Another plus is that this is more than a competent reading, this is a great performance
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- Darwin8u
- 10-28-12
Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
Nabokov's violin playing in the void of a totalitarian nightmare. Invitation to a Beheading belongs in those 20th Century novels by Orwell, Huxley, Kafka and Koestler that explore the individual revolting against an absurd totalitarianism. Cincinnatus C is an opaque prisoner being punished by a translucent society for his gnostical turpitude. With a Gogol-like playfulness and a Kafkaesque absurdity and a linqusitic inventiveness that belongs solely to Nabokov,
'Invitation to a Beheading' explores the many ways the state (and society) acts to destroy or force conformity on those whose vision is different. Beware those who transgress social norms, your days are both numbered ... and infinite
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23 people found this helpful
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- Lewis Teeter
- 08-20-19
The Book I Liked Least by My Favorite Author
Though Nabokov vehemently denies the Kafka influence it's hard to not feel it. I could have found this book more enjoyable if it held the beautiful writing style that makes me such a fan but even that was missing in 'Invitation'. I suggest 'Ada or Ardor' if one wants to read beyond Lolita.
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- Carolyn
- 11-01-17
this novel was meant to be read aloud - great job
I couldn't stop listening to this rendering of Nabokovs best novel - IMO. I read this book in college while studying English literature. I was fascinated with the story and the exquisite prose. The narrator did a great job. I was uncertain whether I would enjoy listening to him at first, as his voice is a bit gravelly and didn't seem suites to the story. His voice quickly grew on me, however, as he read the somewhat challenging prose very much the way I heard it in my mind when I read it years ago. He did an exceptionally good job at bringing what I'll call the Frenchman in the in the neighboring cell- so as not to include a spoiler - to life for me in a new way. He also handled very well the sometimes complicated dialogue that goes on both within and around Cincinnatus. This is Nabokovs best work IMO and the narrator only added to the story. I'd recommend this book to any serious reader.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Abraham Thomas
- 08-05-24
I didn't get it
Friend told me it was a masterpiece. I had a hard time staying motivated to listen through this book. If there was a point, I was too busy struggling to be engaged with the book to actually find the point.
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