Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading"

One of the few novels by Nabokov I haven't already read, and it took me a while to get started (ever since a friend's reading it inspired me to read it, it has been patiently waiting for me on the "list").

I picked it up before Stiller (got through the intro in which Nabokov denies Kafka's influence; made a couple false assaults on the text), but finally Stiller won out.

Anyway, now I'm up for it (already 20% through a relatively short text: 180 pgs), and a somewhat lackluster beginning (or was it only me?) has been followed by a carriage of words that has steadily pulled me in and along.

Perhaps the first underscore worth repeating:

. . . but here is what I want to express: between his movement and the movement of the laggard shadow--that second, that syncope--there is the rare kind of time in which I live--the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather . . .