After an aborted attempt at reading a listless novel, I picked up something which was sure to make my spine tingle: Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, which I first read several years ago. This time I got stuck in the delightfully mystifying foreword he wrote for its English translation in 1959, a quarter century after the initial publication. I decided to spend the night chasing some threads which, for unknowable reasons, intrigued me.