Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

What would you do if you knew you were about to die?

What would you do if you were in prison and you knew you were going to die — but you didn’t know when?

Those are some of the central questions in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, a novel I saw a blonde girl engrossed with on the bus the other day. I imagine the book was for class, because I’m not sure whether Beheading is a novel someone would choose for light summer reading.

Beheading recounts the final days of Cincinnatus C., a prisoner from a fictitious country who is sentenced to death for “gnostical turpitude.” The term vaguely means Cincinnatus has a depraved disregard for matter — flashbacks reveal that as a child he could levitate or perform other tricks that indicated this disregard. Put simply, Cincinnatus is put to death because he is different. His presence makes others feel uncomfortable.

One of the central problems of Beheading, however, is that Cincinnatus has no idea when he is going to die. In the twenty days that the novel spans, Cincinnatus tries in vain to discover his expiration date, but to no avail. His jailer and fellow prisoners try to get him to interact with them, to play games, eat and joke around. All Cincinnatus wants to do is figure out when he will die.

The prisoner’s other desire is to write a piece of work expressing himself, “in defiance of all the world’s muteness.” But because he’s not sure how long he has to finish it, he feels like he can’t write it at all.

According to at least one interpretation of the novel, Nabokov’s work explores the theme of conformity. Cincinnatus is condemned because he operates on the fringes of society, and others look down on him because he will not participate in social norms. He doesn’t want to dance, joke or play with the other prisoners. He only wants to know when he will die.

Nabokov is best known for Lolita, his disturbing tale about a man’s sexual obsession with his 12-year old stepdaughter. The prolific Russian-American author wrote Beheading in Russian before it was translated by his son, Dmitri.

“Generally speaking, I am a slow writer, a snail carrying its house at the rate of two hundred pages of final copy per year (one spectacular exception was the Russian original of Invitation to a Beheading, the first draft of which I wrote in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration),” he said in an interview with Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature in the spring of 1967.

The acclaimed novelist was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg and grew up in a wealthy, multi-lingual family. They moved frequently, especially later in the author’s life, due to the political turmoil in Russia and the onset of World War II. Eventually, Nabokov found himself in the United States, with his wife and son, working at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Before long he was introduced to the American editors that would lead him to worldwide recognition.

Nabokov died in 1977, and the incomplete manuscript of his last novel has been sitting in a Swiss bank vault ever since. His son, Dmitri announced in April 2008 that he would publish the novel, against his father's wishes.

The 240-page Beheading is available in paperback on Amazon for less than $10.50.

A.M. Homes' The Mistress' Daughter

While waiting in line at the ferry terminal (I know, I wasn’t on a bus, but ferries are basically giant buses that travel over water), I did what I usually do -- I searched the covers of books people held, looking for a title to catch my eye.

One girl standing next to me was devouring a little novel called The Mistress’s Daughter. The girl on the front cover just looked so forlorn that I immediately wondered what the book was about and why the person who held it was reading it.

As it turns out, The Mistress’s Daughter isn’t a novel at all, but a memoir from A.M. Homes, an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for her novel This Book Will Save Your Life.

In her memoir, Homes, who was adopted at a young age, details the painful reunion (and ensuing events) she endured with her biological parents, as she uncovered the sordid history of her parents’ past and her own beginnings:

“Christmas 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C. ‘We have something to tell you,’ my mother says. ‘Someone is looking for you.’ After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young, unmarried, and my father older with a family of his own,” she writes.

As the story goes, Homes’ birth mother, Ellen, became involved with a married man when she was a teenager, who then dumped her when she became pregnant. Swell guy. When Homes is in her thirties, her birth mother seeks her out, asking her to “take good care of me.” Homes suspects that Ellen just wants to reconnect with daddy dearest.

Homes eventually meets her biological father, Norman, but his empty promises leave her feeling even more conflicted – Norman tells Homes he will introduce her to his family, her half-siblings, only to renege on the deal after a paternity test proves he is her dad. Ellen, meanwhile, imposes herself on Homes’ life in a number of ways, stalking her and begging her for a kidney. Ellen’s eventual death sends Homes into a whirlwind of confusing, conflicting feelings.

The Mistress’ Daughter appears to be an exploration of themes like identity and belonging, framed in the story of an adult woman who still deals emotionally with her adoption.

As Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, puts it, “The Mistress's Daughter has the beguiling pull of mystery, memory and surprise... It lays bare those questions about our essential selves: How did we become who we are? What elements of inheritance, neglect, accident and choice gave us our confused identity, our quirky personality, our urges to be wholly loved?”

Homes, who wrote for the TV drama The L Word, has the reputation of being a private person. "What can I tell you about my family life? I have one child, I live in New York City, I have a dog and, you know, a really busy life," she said in an interview with bookpage.com, where she details the experience of writing her memoir.

“One of the hardest things about it was taking something that was so emotional and psychological and finding words for it. It's an emotional experience that's very primitive. It's the basic experience of being separated from your parents,” she said.

Unlike a novel, where threads are likely to be wrapped up, Homes' memoir probably offers little closure for Homes and others seeking the answers to questions like 'Who am I?' But that's how life is, and Homes acknowledges that, even coming to accept the fact that her birth father's family might see him in an entirely diffferent light:

"As you grow up you just realize that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than they first appear, which is kind of a great thing and kind of hard to deal with. It's hard to reconcile and accept that people who are capable of great things also do horrible things. But the sophisticated approach is to realize that a person can be different and behave differently in different situations."

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

The other day, I saw this girl poring over Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere. Of course, the first thing I noticed about her was what she was reading, and not the fact that she had tightly-curled, purple hair, a cat tattoo on her left arm and the emblem of a skull on her purse. But those three things were hard to miss.

Neverwhere caught my eye primarily because of the name Neil Gaiman, an English author. Gaiman is probably best known to mainstream America for his novel Stardust, which was made into a fantastically enchanting film with Claire Danes, Charlie Cox and Michelle Pfeiffer, as the delightfully wicked witch. Kind of this generation's The Princess Bride; you should check it out if you haven't.

But anyway, I haven't read Stardust, although I've been meaning to, and I wasn't familiar with anything else Gaiman has done or, really, Gaiman himself, so here was my chance to school myself, and wow did I find out I was kind of an idiot:

Turns out Gaiman is something of a big deal, at least in the fantasy-fiction world, where he's won at least a dozen awards for his works, which include the acclaimed The Sandman comic book series, numerous poems, novels and some screenplays. The former journalist's first book was about the band Duran Duran, and Neverwhere, as it turns out, was originally an English television miniseries he created in 1996. The novel was adapted three episodes into the show's run and apparently garnered more international popularity than the TV show itself. The two formats are more or less identical, save for more characterization and exposition in the novel. The show lasted 6 episodes and is available on DVD.

Neverwhere tells the story of Richard Mayhew, a Scotsman living in London with a boring job and perhaps more cumbersome fiancée, Jessica, who sounds kind of horrible. One day, Richard helps out a mysterious young girl named Door, whom he finds bleeding in the street. After this, however, he realizes that he's become invisible to those around him and slowly his fiancée and others forget who he is. Cue the creepy music. 

Mayhew learns that he no longer exists to people who live in "London Above" and must journey to the mysterious "London Below" to find Door, as well as some answers. He travels through the maze of a sinister alternate universe, meeting creatures, friend and foe, along the way.

Gaiman sounds awesome and really down-to-earth, like a guy who just happened to become famous one day. His transition into making movies has obviously made him prolific, and I wonder why I hadn't heard of him before Stardust. I like the fact that he is so versatile, and open to whatever medium is offered to him.

"I'm not very good at genre snobbery," Gaiman said in an interview with bookslut.com. "If it's anything I'm interested in, I'd obviously love to do it. And I keep bumping into people who'd much rather I did one thing or another. My movie agent would much rather I did movies forever and didn't, for example, do TV. Whereas TV is fun, lots of people see it. It's interesting to do TV. I like doing novels, but I'm astonishingly puzzled and grateful that I live in a universe that I have a short story collection published as a major novel."

The writer has a new novel, The Graveyard Book, out in 11 weeks in the United States, and as a result of this blog, Stardust will most definitely be bumped up my reading queue. I'm also going to need to check out Neverwhere on DVD and get a better understanding of why that purple-haired girl couldn't put her book down.

Thanks for reading!

An Introduction

When I take the bus to work each morning, it can be hard not to fall asleep. It's quiet, there are not as many crazies and there's something peaceful about the steady lull of the wheels. This, of course, only lasts until the morning commuters file in and cram the bus to its full capacity.

In my immense boredom, I stare at my fellow commuters. Not in a creepy way, but in a curious-to-know-about-their-lives kind of way, which I guess can be creepy.

The most interesting thing to me, however, isn't some weird minute detail about their face or their clothing. I've noticed that the first thing I look at is what they're reading: I check out the covers of their books, I try to see if they're reading a newspaper I'm familiar with, or sometimes, I'll admit, I peer over their shoulders to read a line or two from some interesting-looking passage.

I guess I've always been curious about what people read. I look at people's bookshelves when I first am invited over; I feel like you can tell a lot about a person based on what's on their shelves.

So anyway, I've started this blog to satisfy my curiosity and give me a reason to stare at people's books some more. Each week, I'll pick one book that I've seen someone read, look into the history of the book and the author a bit, and probably digress horribly somehow.

Thanks for reading. Up next, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

http://thedaily.washington.edu/blog/2008/07/15/bus-books-blog-curious-and-avid-reader-introductio/