I rarely rate a book at only 1 star, but Invitation to a Beheading proved an awful reading experience for me. It took me about two months to finish this novel, although it has merely 223 pages. However, my mindset towards reading is that I finish a book no matter how much I dislike it, because I am well aware of the hard work an author puts into writing. Aside from Invitation to a Beheading, the only novel written by Nabokov that I have read is obviously Lolita, his masterpiece, which I enjoyed it to a higher degree compared to Invitation to a Beheading. Maybe my disappointment with this book derives from the fact that it seemed to me that it was poorly translated into Romanian and now and then I wasn't even sure what was actually going on. I figured out that through his main character, Cincinnatus, and the couple of days he spent in jail ahead of his execution, the author wanted to reflect certain profound ideas but it simply didn't work out for me. In my opinion, even though this novel is relatively short, it is a difficult read and requires a lot of attention. I noticed that there is a significant number of people who have enoyed this book written by Nabokov, therefore I am probably the one having a problem.