Nabokov

I am starting to fall behind a bit on this and I am not covering every book that I read for one reason or another.  Today I am going to write briefly about Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.  Before that, however, I want to note that I re-read Jacques Ranciere's book The Politics of Aesthetics.  Ranciere's work is foundational to my own scholarship and I tend to agree with a lot of his thoughts on disagreement and dissensus.  I will likely read and write about more of his books later on, but I had forgotten that this book was primarily taken up with sections written by other commenters (Gabriel Rockhill's translator's note is helpful to understanding the work and is clearly written, Slavoj Zizek's afterward is typically dense, etc).

I originally read Invitation to a Beheading a number of years ago while in graduate school.  After having read Lolita and Pale Fire for a seminar, I delved a bit deeper into Nabokov's work and this is one that I had read.  One of Nabokov's earlier novels, Invitation to a Beheading is more absurd than what he will go on to author.  In this novel, Cinncinatus is imprisoned and sentenced to die for an imaginary crime.  He is visited by his jailer, the jailer's daughter, a mysterious second prisoner and his own family.  The narration dances around the nature of his crime without ever revealing what he had done.  At the same time, the actual execution is delayed and Cinncinatus is not allowed to know the actual date of his death.  This pains him because he sees knowing the day of his death as a consolation for being condemned.  He thinks that freedom comes with the price of never knowing with certainty when one will die.  Toward the end of the novel, Cinncinatus realizes that he can alter his reality more than he had been aware.  In the end, as he is walking to his death, he wills away the executioner, the scaffold, and the crowd.  He has effectively shifted his reality and there is no resolution to this.  In a forward to the novel, Nabokov writes that he had never read Kafka at the time of writing this despite the similarities with the other author's work.  Invitation to a Beheading does play with the absurd in a similar fashion to Kafka's work, but it veers toward something else.  Kafka's protagonists never gain the agency to shift their own reality the way that Cinncinatus eventually does.    Instead, Kafka's characters are left to die alone, are mired in the absurdity of the situations in which they find themselves, or are equally mysteriously released from those absurdities through no actions of their own.  I don't know what to make of this difference aside from noting it.

Popular history

My most read is Erik Larons' The Devil in the White City, a popular history of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer H.H. Holmes who operated near the fair.  I don't have a lot to say about the book itself aside from enjoying it as a read and one bit about the structure.  The focus of the chapters shifts back and forth between those about Daniel Turnham, the chief designer/architect of the fair, and those about Holmes.  There are a few other chapters about other topics from time to time, but mainly they alternate between these two subjects.  As I read this, I found the dual narratives to be interesting in their own rights, but did not ever get a strong sense of the parallel.  I think the problem is that Larson wanted to show the dichotomy between the "white city" of the World's Fair that showcased the best of the Gilded Age and the gritty, crime-ridden "black city" of urban Chicago.  The polarization of the city is an interesting idea, and one that probably would hold up under a more rigorous history, but the problem comes from using Holmes as an emblem of the darkness in Chicago.  The World's Fair actually was the culmination of industry and genius coming together to create a magical place.  Larson shows this well and celebrates the achievements of it while remaining realistic about the difficulties behind it.  But Holmes' story does not precisely parallel this.  His story is one of the lengths one man will go to in order to fulfill his own dark fantasies.  His story is full of too much conjecture compared with the historical record of the fair.  This doesn't make the central idea of the book bad, it just throws it off balance.  Holmes' story stretches a bit thin at times when keeping up with the story of the fair.  This isn't Larson's fault.  After all, Holmes necessarily worked in secret while the fair was built on a world stage.  There just isn't as much to Holmes as there is to the fair.
This is a minor complaint, however.  Both sides of the story are well-written and well-researched and the whole was an enjoyable read.